Ivan Kyncl was born on 15 April 1953 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) on 15 April 1953. Denied university admission because of his father's dissident activities, he trained as a commercial photographer. He documented Charter 77 and communist persecution, before immigrating to England in 1980, where he became a leading theatre photographer, working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and other major companies. Ivan Kyncl died in London, England on 6 October 2004.
Photographer Ivan Kyncl was born on 15 April 1953 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). His father, Karel Kyncl, was a journalist and radio broadcaster who was dismissed following the Soviet-led invasion of 1968 and subsequently imprisoned for opposing the communist regime. Penalised for his father's political activities, Kyncl was repeatedly denied admission to Prague's Film and TV School (FAMU). He trained instead as a photographer, briefly working as a commercial photographer. In 1976, while employed as a stablehand for a state circus, he secured permission to study externally, but a serious skiing injury interrupted his studies. He subsequently supported himself as a nightwatchman, leaving his days free for independent photographic projects.
An early signatory of Charter 77 in 1977, Kyncl became a visual chronicler of the human-rights movement and its persecution inn Czechoslovakia. He photographed Václav Havel, banned singer Marta Kubišová, clandestine performances in actress Vlasta Chramostová's apartment and political prisoners. A carefully planned sequence, documenting secret-police surveillance of former politician František Kriegel, appeared in The Sunday Times in June 1977; in 1980 he photographed imprisoned dissident, Otta Bednářová, waving from her cell window in Opava. He also portrayed Charter 77 women for a publication by Eva Kantůrková, and documented care homes, Roma communities and socialist public ceremonies. Circumventing censorship, he concealed cameras and negatives and smuggled photographs to western media, sometimes publishing as Ivan Barta or through London's Palach Press Agency. Repeatedly detained and interrogated, he also had his studio and archive seized. Pressured into exile following an arrest while photographing police intervention at Chramostová's apartment theatre, he left Prague in October 1980.
Arriving in England as a stateless political refugee, with little English and few resources beyond his camera, Kyncl rebuilt his career. He photographed the exiled Czech poet, Ivan Blatný, while a meeting with playwright Harold Pinter brought a commission for the play One for the Road (Lyric Hammersmith, 1984). His photographs illustrated the published play text, and Pinter subsequently commissioned him for Other Places in the West End. Kyncl approached the Royal Shakespeare Company with photographs of rehearsals for a Havel play, prompting artistic director, Terry Hands, to commission him for Peter Barnes's Red Noses (1985). His images captured the production's anarchic atmosphere and established his reputation at a time when British theatre photography was generally dominated by comparatively static publicity pictures. He soon became the RSC's house photographer, documenting approximately 50 productions in Stratford-upon-Avon and London and forming a lasting friendship with Hands.
Over the following two decades Kyncl became one of Britain's most sought-after theatre photographers, working for the National Theatre, Almeida, Royal Court, Donmar Warehouse and West End theatres, and at venues in Sheffield, Chichester, Birmingham and Glyndebourne. He photographed plays, opera and musicals, with commissions associated with Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and worked with film director, Roger Michell. At the National Theatre alone, he documented 61 productions. Among the actors he photographed were Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw and Antony Sher. Productions he recorded included An Inspector Calls (National Theatre, 1992), Mojo (Royal Court, 1995), Baby Doll (Birmingham Rep, 1999), Plenty (Almeida, 1999) and The Seagull (Chichester, 2003). Rejecting conventional publicity photographs, he moved between auditorium, balconies, wings and stage, working close to actors to capture fleeting gestures, movement and emotion. His dramatic chiaroscuro and unusual viewpoints gave stage photography new expressive intensity. After evening shoots he often developed film overnight at his Battersea studio, delivering prints within hours. Colleagues admired his near-invisibility among performers. Hands called him the 'Cartier-Bresson of theatre photographers', praising his ability to capture an entire production in a single image (The Guardian 2004).
His dissident photography was exhibited alongside work by Bernd Markowsky in West Berlin (1982) and published in After the Spring Came Winter (1983; English edition 1985). In Britain, he exhibited at Cambridge Darkroom (1984), alongside an exhibition by fellow Czech, Josef Koudelka. In 1985 he married Alena Melichar, an artist and daughter of Czech émigrés, who became a close collaborator. His exhibition Living Room Theatre in Prague – Photographs by Ivan Kyncl held at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith (1986), featured 22 images of clandestine performances.
Kyncl acquired British citizenship but retained close ties to Czech cultural life, helping arrange a theatre visit by President Václav Havel, following the Velvet Revolution of 1989. His work was also featured in a Czech photography exhibition associated with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival (1993) and Theatre in Black and White at Malvern Theatres, Worcestershire (1998).
Ivan Kyncl died in London, England on 6 October 2004. Posthumous recognition included a solo exhibition in Prague (2007), the study Rebellion with a Camera (2014), and the Victoria and Albert Museum's acquisition of his theatrical archive (2018) and exhibition Ivan Kyncl: In the Minute (2019). In the UK public domain, his archiveis held by the V&A, while some 20,000 negatives from his Czechoslovak years are held by the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany.
Irene Iacono
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ivan Kyncl ]
Publications related to [Ivan Kyncl ] in the Ben Uri Library