Veronica Zemanova

Veronika Zemanova was born in the farm country of the Sumava mountains in southern Bohemia, the southernmost part of what was then Czechoslovakia. The year was 1975 and that year divided the twenty years of life behind the Iron Curtain of communism from the fourteen yet to come until the country would once again become free.
Veronika grew to her early teens on that small farm, nestled deep in the mountains. She lived a very simple life in the serenity of nature and the freedom that comes with having few choices. She loved animals, perhaps because she could talk to them of her dreams in a time and place where families no longer had dreams. The future Czech Republic during those years was a very poor country, the farm areas virtually forgotten and frozen in time. It was a place where few outsiders were seen and life turned from one day to the next with little to differentiate their unending march across the calendar. The cities were rumored to be full of danger and the corruption that always accompanies abuse of political power.

Casting aside her fears and those of her family, when Veronika turned 18 she took her few personal belongings, left her parents house and moved to Prague , the capitol, the magic Golden City on the Vltava river. Little of gold or magic greeted Veronika. Arriving by train into the murky depths of the central station and knowing no one, she struggled through those first years in unbelievable poverty, sharing the smallest rooms with strangers. A toilet in the hall was the norm, but no bathroom and if she wanted to wash herself she had to go into the street and use a fountain.
The ‘Velvet Revolution’ had come four years earlier and Veronika remembered from the television the hundreds of thousands of people crowding the streets of Prague, the burning flags and the cry for freedom demanded by millions within the Czech Republic. The Cold War had ended, but where were the good times, the promised opportunities, the easing of the hard life she’d known throughout her young years?

Veronika worked days when she could find time away from class and nights almost always, to survive and to pay for photography school. It had long been her dream to become a photographer, to capture moments, to freeze-frame the imagery within her mind and transfer it to the page.
Turning twenty, she had matured into an amazingly beautiful girl with an erotic, sensual body, a combination that drove every man crazy. Followed everywhere, stared at and approached by strangers, Veronika’s natural shyness deepened and she began to resent her beauty, thinking it the reason men treated her rudely. She saw their disrespect of her as a woman with goals, talent and ambition, lusting after her only as an object of sexual desire.
Veronika consciously made herself less attractive, forgoing makeup, wearing baggy pants and outsized sweaters. From deep in the shelter of such formless clothing, a shy and talented girl looked bravely out into a world that was increasingly competitive.
Veronika survived to become a photographer with her own modest equipment and small studio . . . then disaster struck . . . a borrowed car, crammed with all her irreplacable equipment, was stolen. She found herself standing in the street, fighting back tears, staring at the empty parking place where her dreams had suddenly turned to smoke and ashes.
Pulling herself together and weighing her options, for the first time Veronika considered one of the offers she had to be photographed nude. And yet once again, despite her incredible beauty and talent, she found herself badly treated by agents and photographers who constantly undermined her self esteem and inner sense of who she was.
Years went by in silent struggle until Veronika finally realized that the personal and professional abuse she had suffered was in fact a matter of jealousy and manipulation, rather than a reflection of who she knew herself to be as an individual. At that time, Veronika promised herself never to allow her vision of who she was to be blurred or diminished by the work, the people or the circumstances.

It was a difficult promise to keep as she boarded a plane for her first flight to Los Angeles, not speaking a single word if English and scheduled to work with a famous photographer. During the LA shoot, she slept for weeks on the bare floor in an empty house, under nothing but a single, thin blanket. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, her soft, wistfully sad and melancholic face began to conquer the magazines.
Serious fashion modeling was a route no longer open to Veronika, as she had begun her career with nude modeling. Her face was so much more beautiful than the world’s supermodels. Lighting, camera angle and slight variations of makeup all conspired to present Veronika as the ‘model of a hundred faces,’ a refreshing variation to the frozen expressions dominating the fashion spreads. Caught up in and handicapped by the style of the moment, fashion photographers told her she was too sexual, that her natural breasts were too large and, setting aside her promise to herself, she began to believe it.

Fashion’s loss turned into Veronika’s artistic gain. In photograph after photograph the viewer looks into the innocence and warmth of her soul---a reconfirmation of who this nature-girl remembers herself to be---a very different perspective that’s turned Veronika into one of the world’s most photographed women. There’s not a famous men’s magazine that hasn’t published her several times. Thousands of websites use her images, making Veronika more ‘clicked on’ than any other model or movie star on the Internet.
Continuing to live in a very small apartment in Prague by herself, she never changed her life-style. Opting not to own a fancy automobile, she used the tram, her long legs or her bicycle to get around. During this period one of the richest men on the planet offered her virtually unlimited money for just a single night in his bed, without success.

No one realized this lovely girl of the photographs wasn’t for sale, was never a woman attracted to money. That was after all, the reputation of the glamour model, to hope to become a ‘trophy wife’ or mistress to a wealthy man. Veronika looked instead for a truer and more personal love, feeling lost in an industry selling sex and the reflection-of-intimacy in every image.
Yet thousands of her fans worldwide recognized the serenity in her photographs. Like no other glamour model, she was able to transcend and bring to another level the erotic, in combination with sensuality and feeling.
At twenty-six Veronika finally created her own website, but she made a disasterous choice of partner and soon lost not only the website, but all the savings she had struggled for over so many years. It wasn’t a good time in her life, but she held to the promise she had made. Then in 2002 she finally met the love she had looked for through those troubled and lonely years and together they started another website, Veronika-Zemanova.com.

They married the following year and her life changed in the myriad ways that present themselves when one positive force becomes aligned with another, when the dreams of loving and being loved, caring and being cared-for become a shared reality.
Highly successful today in the many varied facets of her life, Veronika remains true to the simple girl who grew up in a time of dreamless communism and dared to dream. Still unattached to money or fame, she never buys her clothes in designer stores and avoids the more ostentatious restaurants. It’s her preference to spend her available time helping animals rather than socializing among celebrities. Still the shy country-girl, Veronika travels the world with her husband and finds fulfillment in a shared life, enjoying her five dogs in the quiet moments when they are home.
There was a particular moment during 2003 when Veronika might have made a choice for tremendous fame and a career all models and actresses would dream of. But she choose love over her career, simplicity over success and has never regretted the decision. She is more beautiful than ever, as her photographs confirm, a beauty directly related to her serenity.
Today, Veronika enjoys a reputation as the world’s most famous glamour model. True to her defining promise to protect her vision of who she is, Veronika only goes on shoots in the company of her husband and the resulting photographs show more than ever, all the love she has to give.