Jan Douša: Bob Krčil: Live Like Your Life’s On the Line

Bohumil “Bob” Krčil, a photographer, adventurer and legendary figure in Czech exile culture, left behind an authentic life story shaped by an unwavering determination to live without compromise in a world divided by the Iron Curtain. After leaving Czechoslovakia in 1969, the 17-year-old Krčil spent time in an alternative community in the south of France, living in a village with Tunisian Bedouins and documenting the ancient hashish culture of the north Indian Kullu Valley. With a sense of impending disaster, he created a unique photographic testimony to the millennia-old culture of Herat, Afghanistan, a few months before it was destroyed by Soviet airstrikes in 1979. His base of operations was New York, where he produced two extensive samizdat collections, Sebráno v New Yorku (Collected in New York), to showcase the vibrant and creative Czechoslovak community. On the basis of dozens of interviews with Krčil’s contemporaries and a vast amount of collected documents, Jan Douša has compiled Bob Krčil. Žít, jako by šlo o život (Bob Krčil: Live Like Your Life’s On the Line), a well-informed and readable biography of Krčil, which is set to represent one of the missing pieces in the mosaic of our knowledge of 20th century Czech culture.