It´s the year of 1963 and my father is riding a motorcycle to the hospital in Kroměříž to see his wife, who is hanging her head over me waiting for an abortion. I am not yet conscious and I am indifferent to this fact, and I retain this feeling with the knowledge I acquire in the future. I am born into a large family, where I will later understand that I have one brother and three sisters. In my childhood I chase beautiful butterflies on forest meadows, observe beetles, dragonflies and discover that the insect world is incredibly beautiful and remarkably elaborate. I make boats from pine bark and shoot with an air rifle or a bow. My parents try to teach me to pronounce "r" and they want me to say "rock", I say "pebble" instead and I go to play with something again. On Tuesday, September 1, 1970, my mother pulled my hand through the city to school. I´m trying to oppose her that I really don't understand what I'm going to do there when I can't read or write and I'm not allowed to play there. In vain. In the fourth grade, under pressure from the teacher and the resistance of my parents, I start attending an art school twice a week. My student book is full of remarks concerning inattention and forbidden drawings in notebooks. With the eighth grade comes the decision what job I´m going to do in the future. My parents definitely want me to become an electrician, because electricians can make a living easily, but my teacher´s intervention is coming again and I am taking talent tests at the Art School in Uherské Hradiště. I proved my talent, though not my knowledge of the Czech language. I progress to the ninth grade and then to an apprentice school for electricians in Hodonín so that my parents would be satisfied. After the first year, however, the teachers make pressure on my breadwinners again saying that I have nothing to do there, so I take the entrance exams to the Secondary Industrial School of Building Materials also in Hodonín, where I am accepted. What to mention from the life at high school? Perhaps just the fact that I am enchanted by the girls and so are they as concerns me, fortunately. With my innate tact, I would rather not describe this in further details, enough that I would get divorced three times in my future life. At that student times, I began to read Kafka, Socrates, Poe, Bradbury with remarks from the others that I am not yet mature enough for this kind of literature. I finished school with difficulty and even before graduation, after a domestic quarrel with my parents, I managed to move to my brother´s for a few months and then to a sublet of a friend. In order not to be prosecuted for subsistence, I go with my landlord around the beautiful Kroměříž thinking about where we could get a job. We pass the local library and it occurs to me that I could ask there. To my amazement, I am accepted. After all, what else would you want to do after studying building materials production than to become a librarian, isn´t it? I´d only been doing the job for three months because I was diagnosed with a tumour in my lungs. Through the lung department at the Kroměříž hospital I continue to Bulovka in Prague and after three months I eventually settle at Žlutý kopec in Brno. The facility where I stay bears a special name: "Research Institute of Clinical and Experimental Oncology", which has not been completely clear to me for a long time, and its late knowledge is all the worse. My future wife Hana helps me to endure hard moments better. When they release me after a year and a half with a forecast of the short future, everyone around me believes in a happy ending, a wedding and everlasting love beyond the grave. I'm the only one to believe only in that grave. However, my calculations are wrong and the Grim Reaper still would not come. I don't know what to do with life, maybe eventually enjoy it, at least a little, what physiognomy allows me. There comes a divorce and then another wedding, another divorce and again a wedding, a divorce and a wedding. It's not as fast as it might seem, because it took twenty years of my life from the first to the last party. In 1989, I´m buying my first camera called Praktika, which I´m selling almost immediately because the film format of the negative does not suit me. I switch to Yashica mat 124G 6x6 and take photos with this machine until 2002, when I become the owner of the beautiful Linhof Master Technika 4x5 inches, with which I take photos on 9x12cm negatives to this day. So, that would do for this book as a curriculum vitae at great speed. What I missed to mention is my current wife who does not introduce herself by name in the society, but she only says: "I am the fourth wife" and who´s been heaven-sent to me as a beautiful angel who can scare my demons away …

Antonín Tesař (April 2021)