Adolf ZIKA - photographer, director, producer

Adolf Zika was born in the town of Prachatice in 1972. He started photographing in 1994 and a year later he won first place in the Sport category of the first Czech Press Photo. In 2000, he was selected among six photographers presented by the renowned Leica brand at the Photokina world exhibition in Cologne, and four years later, he was selected by the Olympus brand too. In 2001, Adolf Zika was the best-selling Czech photographer at the Paris Photo fair in the Louvre.

He is the author of a unique book project entitled The Last Book of the Century (2000). In the summer of 2006, with the support of Hasselblad and Leica, he took photographs with two different cameras and formats, creating the publication 6 Days and 24 Hours of Le Mans, which shows the world's most famous car race in an unconventional way. In the same year, a large, partly retrospective book of black-and-white photographs called Luxurious Luminescence appeared on Czech and Slovak shelves.

Adolf Zika worked for many renowned companies and fashion brands. He greatly influenced the visual style of Pietro Filipi, CK Fischer, Australian Bodycare, the mobile operator Orange Slovakia. In 2003, he was behind the new visual concept of TV Nova, creating promo sheets for all 33 programmes as part of the sale of the television to a new owner. He also created many covers and dozens of pictorials for the Playboy magazine. Between 2001 and 2005, Zika was the official photographer for the Ferrari MenX and Charouz Aston Martin Racing teams, with whom he toured more than three dozen race tracks around the world.

Zika has directed more than 100 TV spots since 2001. In 2006 and 2007, he yet again entered the world of fast cars, the result of which was a comprehensive photographic publication that captures the dramatic moments of an A1GP season, including behind-the-scenes peeks from each race.

In 2007, he wrote and directed a Czech-American feature documentary film about a world‑renowned photographer called Jan Saudek – Trapped by His Passions, No Hope for Rescue. The film won the Glass Eye Award for Best Documentary at the Eurofest festival in Montreal a year later.

In 2008, Adolf Zika made another feature documentary film as he returned to the world's most famous and also most controversial car race. Le Mans Phenomenon was selected as one of the world's best sports documentaries of the year at the World FICTS Challenge.

In 2009, the book One Year of My Life in 3285 Pictures by Adolf Zika in Cooperation with Leica was published, a unique photographic project describing one year of Zika’s ordinary and extraordinary life in nine photographs a day. Based on the main idea of this book, in the same year he founded the online photographic documentary project Week of Life, whose main goal was to create a sort of a photo library of humanity.

Week of Life became part of Czech cultural heritage three years later and spontaneously spread to almost 50 countries around the world without any paid advertising.

A year later, Zika once again sat in the director’s chair and made a short documentary film called Silent Passion with the subtitle Love for a Hobby Knows No Boundaries.

In October 2010, the book In the Shadow of Light was published, which contains not only black-and-white nudes, but also black-and-white portraits of celebrities and raw views of landscapes where time has stood still. However, artistic nudes predominate in the author's work, forming the key part of the publication.

In 2012, he directed the feature documentary film The Czech Land, Your Home, composed of footages shot by citizens of the Czech Republic. In the same year, he won the METRO Zlatá pecka 2011 award for the TV spot Anthem.

In 2014, he finally decided to make his first feature film, Rumbling, which won the top award for best feature film at the 2015 Motorcycle Film Festival Brooklyn in New York.

In 2016, Zika showed his production and directorial vigilance when within 21 days of Czech judoka Lukáš Krpálek’s Olympic triumph he turned time-lapse footages of the Olympic champion into the feature documentary Golden Man from Rio.

In 2017, the first volume of the portrait photography book Charisma with American actor Johnny Depp on the cover was published. It captures the uniqueness and inner charm of various cultural and public figures.

In 2018, Adolf Zika finished another feature documentary film entitled Robert Vano – The Story of a Man, which captures the life story of the quirky American photographer with Czechoslovakian roots.

A year later, Zika in collaboration with Czech Television created a 30-part series of short documentaries commemorating the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. Entitled Velvet Traces, the series through 30 photographs captures the turning points or significant moments of our post-revolutionary era between 17 November 1989 and the end of 2018.

In 2020, Zika once again showed the readiness of a former top athlete when, in collaboration with Czech Television, he made the feature documentary film Spring in Emergency in just 66 days of the state of emergency. The film provided a conceptually unconventional and visually original look at how the COVID-19 epidemic has changed us.

In 2021, he together with Czech Television co-produced the feature documentary film Mr. Kriss, which scored 92% on the Czech-Slovak Film Database. The documentary about an exceptional young dancer and artist is also a sensitive account of maturing, hang-ups and hardships of talented individuals. Mr. Kriss won the Grand Prize at the Sportfilm Liberec festival and subsequently received a medal and a special prize in the feature documentary category at the FICTS Challenge 2021 Worldwide Final in Milan.

In 2021, Adolf Zika made his first appearance as a producer of another author’s project when he produced the first season of the musical show Kamil Střihavka’s Icons. By 2025, four seasons had been filmed, each consisting of ten episodes.

In 2023, Zika directed the film Alžběta. The story of Alžběta Jungrová portrays the life of one of the most prominent photographic personalities of the new generation – a female reporter and documentarist devoted to war photojournalism.

At the beginning of 2024, Czech Television premiered his feature documentary film about the world-renowned fashion designer Blanka Matragi. This film achieved one of the highest viewership ratings for a documentary in the history of Czech Television.

In the summer of 2024, Zika shot his long-awaited second feature film, The Healing Effects of Self-Deception, based on the famous play Enigma Variations by French playwright Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, which has been translated to more than 50 languages. The film is expected to premiere in February 2026.

In 2025, Adolf Zika completed the feature documentary Gentle Fighter. It is a powerful and inspiring film about Czech judoka Lukáš Krpálek, whose path to Olympic victory is much more than just a story of sporting success.

Adolf Zika's photographs have been exhibited by galleries in many countries in Europe and around the world. However, he most appreciates the retrospective exhibition with the apt title 25 Years in the Shadow of Light, which took place in the prestigious Mánes gallery in Prague in the summer of 2018.

He has visited more than 50 countries around the world on his photography travels.

www.adolfzika.com