Author Description

<p>Created in 1973-74 and previously unpublished in English in its entirety, <i>Circus Sideshow</i>, by Czech-born American photojournalist Antonin Kratochvil (born 1947), offers an amazing pageant of tightrope walkers, jugglers, snake women, giants, dwarves, contortionists and fire eaters at a circus in Gibsonton, Florida, a small coastal town near Tampa.</p><p>The town was then known as a winter vacation hotspot for circuses, a place to recharge before setting out on their spring and summer cross-country tours.</p><p>Visiting the mobile homes, caravans and trailers of the performers, and walking through their narrow alleys and circus tents, Kratochvil was able to photograph freely and intimately, and his black-and-white photographs testify to his vision of them as people expelled from society, but [who] were able to maintain their dignity. In 1974 he sent his photographs to the New York editorial office of <i>American Photo</i>, which the magazine's art director, Jean-Jacques Naudet, printed as a ten-page report. <i>Circus Sideshow</i> documents an amazing lost American subculture.</p>