I have been trying to figure out, what is it that fascinates me about photography, ever since I started doing it.

I graduated as an architect in Prague and have a strong visual and aesthetic feeling along with an art history education. Always interested in art and painting, I fell for photography in my late teens, when I first saw "Exiles" by the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka.

There was a whole story in each photograph. Every picture spoke of the unspeakable. I saw the beauty, the ambiguity and the mystery of life. Koudelka's "Exiles" is about his most private experience, yet it talks to everyone. Life can be seen as exile, we are all strangers trying to make sense of the world and find a home in it.
This is why I photograph - to express my experience and observations about life.

Photography is fascinatingly democratic, on every level. Almost everyone has an access to a camera, and the Internet has made it possible for everybody's pictures to be seen. There is a free market of images, and the only thing that makes a difference is how strong they are. Today, there are hardly any limits to what photography can depict: the tragedy of a war, world disasters and the strongest emotions captured by journalistic photographers; the most private emotions and body parts photographed by artists; peeks into everyday lives of celebrity icons in paparazzi photography; the most amazing moments of wild life in nature photography; the power and intensity of documentary photography, capturing the most intimate aspects of peoples lives... There is hardly anything one would find new or shocking in the world of photography... and all this created, in my mind, a new power of subtlety.

Most of my documentary work shows life in the countries of Europe. Relatively recently, the sense of fully belonging to Europe was restored to my part of the world. Prague, Moscow, Bucharest or Sarajevo are now as much part of Europe as Paris, Lisbon or Helsinki.

There were two main reasons, why I started my "Europeans" documentary project: The first one was personal and had to do with a sense of belonging and finding my place in the world. Going out there, seeing it and trying to figure what it is all about seemed like a logical thing to do.

The other reason had to do with the fall of the Berlin wall, foreigners travelling to Prague and knowing nothing about Eastern Europe, and us knowing very little about them. The wall was down, we knew very little about one another, and just as we started learning about each other, a new wall was erected with the war in Yugoslavia - the wall between civilised Europe and the Europe of nationalism, religious fundamentalism and violence.

My European journey showed me something that I tried to capture in my photographs: there are no walls, there are no differences between people. Everybody strives to be happy, everybody wants to live in freedom, everywhere people feel lonely and alienated, and the thing that matters most to all of us - cliche as it sounds - is love.