He was born in 1947 in Lovosice where his father Jaroslav Kratochvíl had a photo studio. His family was affected by the fight of the new communist regime against businessmen in 1949. Having been robbed of their property, they had to leave Lovosice and were relocated to a work camp in Vinoř. His father was forced to work in a factory and his mother in agriculture. They were released from the work camp in 1953 and moved to Karlín in Prague. Antonín Kratochvíl could not study due to political reasons so he trained to be a construction locksmith in Pozemní stavby. He got married in 1967, but fled through Yugoslavia to Austria before his son was born (he saw his son for the first time after eighteen years). After that he was sentenced in Czechoslovakia to seven years of imprisonment for an unlawful departure from the Republic and for spreading speeches from the congress of writers of that time. He experienced a refugee camp in Traiskirchen, prison in Sweden, French foreign legion and ended up in the Netherlands. Thanks to a photographer Vojta Dukát’s recommendation he finished a Bachelor’s programme on Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In 1972 he got married for the second time to an American woman and went to USA. He started working for prestigious American newspapers and magazines such as Playboy, Penthouse, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times Magazine or Newsweek. He gradually received several awards and took photos of many celebrities from the artistic world. His parents could visit him in USA in 1975. Jill, his thirds wife, was American too. In the middle of the 70s he set out to the Eastern Block where he was capturing the life behind the Iron Curtain and life after its fall for twenty years. In December 1997 he published a book called “Broken Dream: Twenty Years of War in Eastern Europe“. He worked as a journalist in places of war conflicts, he recorded genocide in Zaire and Rwanda, refugees in Bosnia and Afghanistan, victims of AIDS epidemics in Zimbabwe and drug smugglers in Guatemala. In recent years he has been involved in capturing disappearing nature and cultures. He has received many awards for his documentary photography (for example three World Press Photo awards). He received his first WPP award in the Portrait category in 1997 and an award in the News category in 2002 for a photo of drug dealers in a Burmese prison. He was awarded a prize in the Nature and the Environment category for a photo of a Congolese woman selling meat of hunted animals. In 2009 he played a distinctive role of a sculptor in Jan Hřebejk’s film Kawasaki's Rose. Antonín Kratochvíl has been married four times and he now lives with his Czech wife Gabriela in New York and Suchdol, Prague. He has three sons – Michael, Anthony Waynne Cooper and Gavyn.
The current exhibition in the Museum of Photography consists of four parts. First, there is a photo collection called Moscow Nights, and then a set of photos called Portraits of Celebrities. The last two parts – photos from a family album and war conflicts captured all over the world – are showed on two TV screens. As a bonus, there are Antonín Kratochvíl’s portraits as there were created by a director Jaroslav Brabec.