Vladimír Dousek

"I got into photography in 1955, I know that very accurately. There's a camera over there, I deliberately brought it here, you can look at it. I got it for Christmas in 1955 and it's a completely primitive camera, East German, her name is Altissa. Something similar was made in our country, it was called Pioneer, it was all made of a plastic named bakelite. But as it was from bakelite, and when it was in the sun, it wasn't completely light-tight. The film was covered in gray from the beginning. But this was a really good camera, for a 6 x 9 film and 6 x 6 centimeters negatives. I had a grandfather who had been involved in photography before the war and had a beautiful villa in the Kokorin valley, where I went on holiday. And he immediately said that when I got there in the summer, he would teach me how to process the photos."

"But to go back to why I put together the book about Berounka. They intended to make the dam there in Křivoklát, now they changed their minds that it probably wouldn't. But I thought that it could not be believed whether it will or will not, so I had some photos and I took something else and in that book there is a valley from Pilsen to Křivoklát. There are a lot of photos of what it really looked like there. There are beautiful castles, Krašov castle, Libštejn castle, Týřov castle. And under Skryjem, it flows through the landscape that Ota Pavel writes about. You know his books about Berounka, about fish, about golden eels. There is also his smokehouse in Kouřim. Today there is more traffic, but then it was an absolutely forgotten valley and there were only cottages. Today, Ota Pavel's hall is very nicely done there, at that time it was an ordinary cottage where some people lived. The most beautiful part of the river would be destroyed by some dam, which was already destroyed by the beautiful Vltava valley, which was full of old mills. And it would turn out the same with Berounka. Fortunately, they decided it wouldn't be there, but that can change at any time, and in that book it's preserved the way it once looked."