Prague Is a Paradise

All photos by Leo Nikolaev

Prague doesn’t need a brochure to sell itself. What with the scenery, the hot girls, the laid back shop owners selling absinthe and knives to British schoolchildren, and the men whose idea of a quiet lunchtime pint is strapping their mouth to a beer-spewing fire hose, the Czech capital is the one Euro-trip Hollywood has yet to kill.

Locals, on the other hand, feel less affectionate towards their city. This may have something to do with all the incapacitated tourists they find sleeping in their doorways each morning. They eat goulash, for fuck's sake. Czechs aren’t known for being the sensitive types, and it's these people at whom photographer Leo Nikolaev has been aiming his camera for the past three years.

Leo has been known to provoke fights and cause problems with the police, and he always carries his Leica Mini 2 to shoot whatever trouble he might be causing. "Norman Parkinson said that a camera can be deadlier than a bullet," Leo says, "and Prague is a pretty vast battlefield. If you decide to walk around alone at night, a camera is the best weapon you can carry with you. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll survive, but if you do, you will also have created a picture that will never die."

—Pavel Cejka

Previous Paradises:

_Phoenix / Leicester / Tbilisi / Los Angeles / Berlin / Rotterdam / Reykjavik / Wootton Bassett / Brighton / Bristol / _Athens__