Emil Fafek (1922-1997) started as a retouche assistant at the print firm of Neubert & Sons in Prague. A self-taught photographer, he made his first photographs as a teenager, and from 1939 onwards he began to publish his photos in newspapers and weekly magazines. During the Second World War, Fafek was a forced laborer in Germany. In early May 1945 he was back in Prague, where he photographed the uprising by the Czech resistance against the German occupators, which ended in a ceasefire when the Soviet Red Army entered the city. That same year, Fafek became a staff photographer of the newly daily founded newspaper Mladá Fronta, where he stayed for more than 40 years.
