IT IS BLACK & WHITE

About the Book

Pictures in this collection are personal photographs, glimpses of people in foreign countries, portraits of my acquaintances, friends, family, and there are few landscapes which fascinated me. Some photos have a parable, others are just fl ashes of memory. In some one can find a message, some are only peeks at the bizarre. My main and only selection criteria was whether I found the snap-shot interesting.

The title of one German book on photography is “Belichtung ist Alles” — lighting is everything. But if I were looking for a lofty title it might be “Story is (Almost) Everything.” In literary story the imaginative metaphors, the beautiful language, the witty observations and character development are considered important attributes of quality of creative writing, but it is solely the narrative of the story which is remembered, which enriches our world of imagination. A few years ago a Pulitzer Prize was awarded for a photograph of a starved, skeletal African child crouching on a parched ground while being watched by a large vulture, just few paces away. You will not find such a unforgettable tale in this amateur photographer’s collection, but I hope a few of the shots in following pages might amuse, and in others one might sense a fable. So, you could peek over the shoulder of author’s past, into the past where he is at home.

I would like to thank Tree, my daughter, for finding the time to edit this text with her usual care. Gratitude goes to my schoolmate Mirek Veska, who taught me to print black and white half a century ago and thus initiated me to the way of recording what interested me onto a strip of celluloid and then on paper with silver emulsion. Only now I realize how it would have been unreliable to record the world only into the vanishing neurons of my hippocampus.

You may enter, to plunge into the pictures, without worrying — it is only the(white and)black magic.

About the Author

Jaroslav (Jarda) C e r v e n k a was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he received degrees in medicine and genetics. He immigrated to Minnesota in 1968 in the wake of Russian invasion and was employed by the University of Minnesota as Professor of Medical Genetics, reknown in the field of cytogenetics and dysmorphology, author of “Chromosomes in Human Cancer.” Lived in Kenya, Japan and Nigeria and traveled extensively and intensively in five continents. His thinking and views were influenced mainly by studies of diverse people and their culture, or lack of one. Jarda Cervenka is the author of three collections of stories, “Mal d’Afrique”, “The Revenge of Underwater Man” and “Fausto’s Afternoon”, travel book for children and young adults “Travels of Missi One” and novel “Ambush.” He is the recipient of Richard Sullivan Prize for Fiction, Minnesota Voices Award and The Franz Kafka Award from the European Circle Franz Kafka. Now retired, he and his wife Sasha live near their children Vojta and Tereza in Minneapolis, dividing their time between Florida Keys and Prague.