The photographer František Dostál was a very gentle, modest, shy and sensitive person, he had an incredibly human point of view. He was very critical, but his criticism never crossed the line of public confrontation. On a personal, informal level, this was no longer the case. From a photographic point of view, he created a quite extraordinary work that is worthy of the title National Treasure. He recorded the times in their poetic and even poetic images. Ordinary dramas that only a man of his character could really notice.
František Dostál (21 July 1938 Prague - 5 December 2022) was a Czech reportage and documentary photographer living in Prague. His most famous works are Summer people, which he created between 1968-1990 in Zlenice on the Sázava River. The subject of his work in the last thirty years is mainly the people of Prague streets. His work is characterised by a subtle humour that benefits from the often absurd encounters of several disparate elements in a single image.
He was born and grew up in poor circumstances in Prague's Vršovice in the family of a tailor and a maid. From his childhood he moved in the area of Bohdalka and Slatiny in today's Prague 10.
He studied at the Industrial School of Mechanical Engineering (1953-1957), where he first became acquainted with photography in X-ray weld quality control.
In his youth he was an active sportsman. As a teenager he became the Czechoslovak record holder in sprint relay and high jump. He attended Otakar Jandera's movement school and after a year of training in the high jump he won the title of national champion in this discipline (1954). Due to military service (1957-1959) and especially health problems, he soon left the sport.
Almost until his retirement, he worked as a machine tool designer at Škoda Plzeň, a company based in Prague.
His partner was photographer Alena Vykulilová. František Dostál died on 5 December 2022, he was 84 years old.
He started photography around 1960, but never became a professional reporter. His first inspiration in photography was his home district of Vršovice. He captured people in seemingly ordinary situations, which, however, already then had a strong artistic charge. Shortly afterwards, he began spending weekends in the village of Zlenice in Posázava. There, between 1968-1990, he photographed a pictorial probe into the life of the tramp society, which he called Summer people. He gained theoretical and practical knowledge at the Vinohrady Photography Club, where he founded the group Město in 1983.
His first picture was printed in 1964 in the weekly Flowers and thousands more followed. In terms of the number of published photographs and participation in international salons and exhibitions, Dostál is still one of the Czech champions. Dostal's photographs were printed in most contemporary newspapers and magazines in the period 1975-1989. They appreciated the richness of the author's motifs and his subtle humour, which partly followed the interwar wave of Czech magazine photography. In 2008, he received the Czech Ministry of Culture Award for Lifetime Contribution to Amateur Photography. He was an honorary member of the Prague Balloon Club and a recipient of the Sic itur ad astra medal. Member of The Lichter than Air Society (USA).
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