Gallery Number & Name
Images in this Gallery
Images
Details
Year / Photographer
Source
Set features
Comments
Veronika had posted an alternate "biography" on her website at one point in time which decribed her life as a little girl growing up in Czechoslovakia. I have transcibed the contents of that biograpghy here:
Veronika Zemanova was born in the farm country of the Sumava mountains in southern Bohemia, the southernmost part of what was then Czechoslovakia. The year was 1975 and that year divided the twenty years of life behind the Iron Curtain of communism from the fourteen yet to come until the country would once again become free.
Veronika grew to her early teens on that small farm, nestled deep in the mountains. She lived a very simple life in the serenity of nature and the freedom that comes with having few choices. She loved animals, perhaps because she could talk to them of her dreams in a time and place where families no longer had dreams. The future Czech Republic during those years was a very poor country, the farm areas virtually forgotten and frozen in time. It was a place where few outsiders were seen and life turned from one day to the next with little to differentiate their unending march across the calendar. The cities were rumored to be full of danger and the corruption that always accompanies abuse of political power.
Casting aside her fears and those of her family, when Veronika turned 18 she took her few personal belongings, left her parents house and moved to Prague , the capitol, the magic Golden City on the Vltava river. Little of gold or magic greeted Veronika. Arriving by train into the murky depths of the central station and knowing no one, she struggled through those first years in unbelievable poverty, sharing the smallest rooms with strangers. A toilet in the hall was the norm, but no bathroom and if she wanted to wash herself she had to go into the street and use a fountain.
The ‘Velvet Revolution’ had come four years earlier and Veronika remembered from the television the hundreds of thousands of people crowding the streets of Prague, the burning flags and the cry for freedom demanded by millions within the Czech Republic. The Cold War had ended, but where were the good times, the promised opportunities, the easing of the hard life she’d known throughout her young years?
Veronika worked days when she could find time away from class and nights almost always, to survive and to pay for photography school. It had long been her dream to become a photographer, to capture moments, to freeze-frame the imagery within her mind and transfer it to the page.
