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Libuše Jarcovjáková tries not to take her own media appearances too seriously. Still, she is among the photographers unafraid to get close to people or to her own memories. In a new episode of the university podcast UniverZ, she explains why, from a young age, she was drawn to adventurous enclaves outside the mainstream: Roma communities on the margins, Vietnamese children in a closed community, or Prague’s T-Club scene. “It’s important to combine intuition with very emotional shooting. I feel less connected to photographs born purely from calculation and intellectual process,” she says.

Her life documentary, I’m Not Who I Want to Be Yet, did not advance to the next round of the Oscars, presented in Los Angeles on March 16. She describes the film’s promotional campaign without gloss. Sixteen screenings and debates over fourteen days in Los Angeles and New York revealed the differences between Europe and America—and the hard logic of the film industry. “How the mechanism works… unfortunately, 99.9 percent of it is about money,” she notes. “Very soon I realized the film had no chance. In the documentary category, the winners tend to be films with a political dimension or those capturing a real tragedy,” she adds.

The second half of the interview focuses on teaching at Sutnarka, where Jarcovjáková has co-led the Photography Studio with Barbora Mrázková for three years. She describes their deliberately dual-track approach. For emerging photographers, she offers simple advice: “Photograph what is close to you. What seems ordinary today will soon no longer be a given. It will be history.”

Listen to the full interview on Spotify or YouTube.