Martin Wágner

Martin Wágner (b. 1980) is a photojournalist and documentary photographer. He comes from a family of sign painters, and spent his childhood in a part of Prague called Strašnice. After elementary school, he attended the Prague School of Photography and also a course in photography at a vocational school. In 2013, he graduated with a Master’s degree from the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University in Opava.

In his work, he is often concerned with the countries of the former Soviet Union. He first visited Subcarpathian Ruthenia in 1994, and has, since 1998, regularly visited Russia and Ukraine. He has photographed at sites of former Soviet gulags in Vorkuta, in several communities of Siberian Old Believers, volcanologists on the Kuril Islands, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the remote Khlebozavod bakery, a salt mine, gold mining in Partizansk, oil wells in the Far East, Siberian reindeer herders, whalers on the Chukchi Peninsula, Lake Baikal frozen over, duck hunting on the Angara River. His expedition to the east have been concluded in his book Siberia (2019) published in 400 ASA edition by Paseka. In recent years, he has gradually been working less in the east and is focusing more on Czech landscape with traces of ancient settlement. He has frequently won awards in the Czech Press Photo competition. He established a graphic design studio specialized in the scanning, pre-press preparation, and professional printing of photographs for exhibition.