Roudnice-born Miroslav Machotka (*1946) began to make a name for himself in the world of artistic photography slowly from the 1970s, with his first solo exhibition in 1974.

Machotka's photographic direction was fundamentally influenced by his encounter with the Polish photographer and art theorist, then director of the Fotomedium Art Gallery in Wroclaw, Jerzy Oleko, who advocated in photography efforts to achieve absolute visual autonomy with an emphasis on high visual sensitivity of the viewer, and in his work used the principles of deconstruction of real space in favour of a completely unique pictorial composition. Miroslav Machotka was also greatly influenced by his collaboration with the Czech historian of photography Anna Fárová, a phenomenal expert and tireless promoter of Czechoslovak photography both at home and abroad.

The character of his work makes Miroslav Machotka one of the outstanding soloists of analogue photography, his thematic focus is on the urban environment and his work regularly appears at prestigious exhibitions of Czech photography of the second half of the 20th century. He uses traditional photographic methods and completely rejects the manipulation of image material in post-production. Machotka's photographs are thus the result of a very specific visual perception of the surrounding space.

Although the selection of photographs relates largely locally to his native Roudnice and his beloved Elbe, especially to the unforgettable Vorovka, in no way can one speak of a portrait of a place with Machotka. Very familiar and close to the author urban corners, popular riverbanks, which lend life-giving energy to cities, are transformed through the camera lens into non-specific images of the concrete world, images that live their own visual poetics, in which inconspicuous ephemeral ordinariness is combined with the immortal uniqueness of the moment.