2024-04-10 12:09:27
Down to earth, hospitable people. Friendly and calm. Traditions preserved in everyday life, excellent wine and warm hospitality. Photographer Kevin V. Ton remembers Moldova with these words. He first visited this small and poor country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine in the spring of 2019 and ended up staying there for almost two months during several visits. He is now presenting his pictures at the exhibition Mlčenlivá krajina.
“I basically fell in love with Moldova right away, especially for the beauty and mood of the countryside,” explains Kevin V. Ton, who is one of the leading contemporary Czech documentary photographers. He was fascinated by many things there.
“Silence, perhaps. Silence interrupted by the occasional barking of dogs, calls of farm animals or bells from churches. The clatter of horses pulling a cart. And also excellent homemade wine or great food, including Lent. Hearty hospitality. The omnipresent unostentatious spirituality that fills every ordinary day. Nights. Black nights, still shining with myriads of stars. Smells that I remember from my childhood. Even with memories of scenery from the Soviet era,” the photographer describes his impressions.
Photos from Kevin V. Ton’s exhibition Silent Landscape (My Moldovan Notebook 2019-2020) | Photo: Kevin V. Ton
Gradually, frame by frame, he tried to capture the fleeting feelings that the silent landscape evoked in him. He was successful until 2020. “Then the pandemic came and postponed my further trips to this country. The war in neighboring Ukraine immediately began, and now I see my further trips to the region as postponed indefinitely,” states Kevin V. Ton.
His photographs, taken in Moldova between 2019 and 2020, are now on display in Prague’s Gallery for Oncology Patients and Supporting Artists Art Against Cancer. It was founded in 2012 by Irena Kraftová, and since then this project has been helping and supporting seriously ill children and adults.
The author of the pictures, Kevin V. Ton, was born in 1966 in Prague. He is a freelance photographer. He has devoted his entire life to vivid, mostly black-and-white, humanist-oriented photography. The basis of his work are mainly long-term projects as well as street photography, which he has been working on for decades.
For his work, he won a number of awards for a long time, including the Award of the Committee of Good Will – Olga Havlova Foundation: My Life with a Handicap 2021 or the Prague Grant (as part of the Czech Press Photo 2022). He participated in several dozen individual and joint exhibitions. He is the spiritual father and co-founder of the photography association Verum Photo, which internally follows the roots of live documentary photography.