Biography

Gustav Aulehla was born on 13 June 1931 in Olomouc, Czech republic as the son of housemaid Eleonora Greipel and clerk Gustav Lamel. The lonesome mother could not feed her son, so she entrusted him to the care of Aulehla family, who later adopted him. He grew up on the outskirts of Olomouc in the Old Víska district in very modest circumstances. For financial reasons he could not study, so he apprenticed as a bricklayer and took up employment with Rudolf Hudec's construction company in Olomouc. His education was later complemented by Industrial construction school in Brno, afterwards he gained greater expertise by studying in Prague. In 1956 he moved to Krnov, got married and started working as a designer at the District construction firm and later as head of projection for North-Moravian state forests. He was married twice. With his first wife he had a son named Marek, with his second wife he had a daughter Marta and a son Robert.

He got his first camera (brand Lord) for his sixteenth birthday from his grandmother. For his first earned money he bought a Flexaret camera, but the device did not satisfy the need of the artist to capture the everchanging moments of life, so he set it aside and instead briefly used a Werra camera. But the best images have been taken by his Leica, to which he remained faithful throughout his photography career. Gustav Aulehla's creative thinking was deeply influenced by the artistic patterns of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, particularly following these principles:
No interference with what's going on in front of the camera, the composition is considered done when you press the camera shutter, no additional zooming or cropping the images, no arranging or micromanaging the scene before the shot is taken.

Gustav Aulehla captured the themes of home, with scenes of city streets, pubs, swimming pools, offices, as well as weddings and funerals. Since the sixties he was also interested in political issues, so he captured May Day celebrations, communist rallies and other political events, revealing their inner emptiness and pomposity. Overall his work tried to capture the atmosphere of grim totalitarian everyday life in Krnov, such as the ubiquitous Soviet soldiers during the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. For his photographic work he was interrogated by the secret communist police (STB). Prior to incarceration he was saved by the amnesty of president Gustav Husák in 1988.

In the late eighties Gustav Aulehla held several smaller exhibitions in Ostrava after the November revolution in 1989 and later in Krnov, Olomouc, Opava, Prague Bratislava and Vienna. His works are part of the photographic collections of several museums in the Czech Republic and abroad.

Gustav Aulehla died on December 19, 2021 at the age of 90.