Jiri Turek was born in Prague in 1965 where he also studied at the Institute of Artistic Photography. He began his professional career in 1990 as a journalist photographer at MF Dnes Daily. As a reporter, he accompanied President Vaclav Havel on his various international visits, reported on the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as on the conflicts in the post-Soviet republics. In 1995 he became the Editor of the MF Dnes Magazine and began specialising in portrait and fashion photography. Since 1998, Jiri has established himself as one of the leading portrait photographers in the Czech Republic. He collaborated with a number of the world's icons, including David Bowie, Luciano Pavarotti, Lou Reed, Sting, the Rolling Stones and many others.
His collaboration with major publications includes front page projects and fashion editorials for, amongst others, Elle, Maxim, Variety and Harper's Bazaar . The front pages of the Czech Forbes Magazine and from last year of the Austrian and Slovakian Forbes Magazine are almost exclusively Jiri's work.
Jiri's has worked on numerous album covers as well as on major advertising campaigns. Amongst his clients were T-Mobile, Finlandia Vodka, Aegon, Vodafone, Oriflame, Skoda Auto, Raiffeisen Bank and many more.
Since 2002, Jiri has been a Professor of Photography at the Silesian University. He routinely conducts workshops and seminars on the art of photography, mainly in collaboration with Leica Gallery Prague and the South Moravia Photoworkshop, of which he is a founding member.
Between the years of 2002-2006, Jiri was based in New York City. Aside from carrying on with his commercial and fashion work, Jiri began experimenting with the "forgotten techniques" of his craft, such as the lith print technology. This new-found passion later gave birth to the cityLOVE project, a series documenting life in the world's most iconic and vibrant cities (London, New York, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg… ). The philosophy behind the project is simple - the best photographic studio is the street, the best models being the men and women walking down it. The photographs aim to evoke the idiosyncratic atmospheres of each metropolis and to capture the individual dynamic of each city. The cityLOVE project has been exhibited first in the prestigious Leica Gallery New York in 2006. It was then shown all around the world in places including Prague, Seoul or New Dehli. The show also had a major citywide exhibition in Prague in the summer of 2012, with large-scale versions of the photographs being shown at various historical locations around the city.