Her work had moved through magazines, museums, celebrity portraiture and editorial worlds built on control, styling and intention. Then tennis entered her life — first as obsession, then as practice, and finally as a new visual frontier. What she found there was a world full of grace, tension, colors, yet still rarely seen with the sensitivity it deserved. 

We spoke with Radka about what happens when a fashion photographer steps onto a tennis court and refuses to leave her background. What emerges is not just a new way of seeing the sport, but a deeper meditation on tennis beauty.

A fashion photographer on the tennis court

“I worked in fashion for most of my life. In Paris, for fifteen years, I was working both in fashion and in art. Then I moved to Los Angeles because I had always loved California and I wanted to explore another side of fashion, start working with Hollywood actors and celebrities. I came to LA and, for a few years, I worked fully in that world, photographing famous people for Vanity Fair, Variety and other magazines. But after some time, I realised that this wasn’t the world I wanted to stay in forever. To be honest, I didn’t really feel happy there. I was looking for something else, something new.

Around that time, I started playing tennis. That was maybe ten years ago, and I became completely obsessed with it. I got so into tennis that at some point I thought about photographing it. I wanted to do something with the tennis world. So I started looking into it, and what I discovered was that, ten years ago, visually there was almost nothing there for me. The aesthetics I knew from fashion and the aesthetics I saw in sport felt so far apart.

That was the beginning. I started exploring this space and, very quickly I began collaborating with Racquet Magazine, which was just about to launch, so in some way we were beginning together. I did a few things with them, and that’s how I got my first credentials for a tennis tournament, here in Indian Wells. I had never seen professional tennis live before. I arrived with a film camera, a Polaroid camera, and a completely different visual mindset. That’s how it started. I began thinking more ambitiously. I wanted to do something more artistic about tennis: to tell the story of such a beautiful sport through a different lens.Through my fashion lens. I wanted to bring beauty to tennis: cinematic aesthetics, film photography, atmosphere — something beyond just the action.

The WTA reached out quite quickly. Then COVID came, and of course everything stopped. We couldn’t really do much. I got stuck in Prague because they wouldn’t let me back into the US. I used my time to work on tennis there in the Czech Republic. What came out was a  beautiful coffee-table book dedicated to Czech tennis. I was photographing old tennis clubs, historic courts, and portraits of famous players in ways they had never really been photographed before. We published the book, it’s something I was very proud of.

Then the tennis tour came back, and I continued traveling at my own expense. I built relationships with players. I kept developing a different kind of tennis photography. Over time, brands started to reach out. It took time, but I began doing campaigns and collaborations that allowed me to keep traveling on tour and, in a way, finance the larger project I’m building. Last year I also created a creative studio here in Los Angeles with the focus on female athletes — helping them build their brands, tell their stories through different lenses, not only in tennis but across other sports as well.”

Challengers

“For me, tennis was a completely new world. The first big challenge was that in fashion photography, or in commercial photography, I was used to controlling everything. You create the image. You build the team. You have the vision, and then you execute it. In sport, it’s the opposite. You arrive as an observer. And for me, that was incredibly hard. It’s funny, actually in my mind I still see these athletes as my talent. They are still a little bit like actors inside my own vision. The difference is that I can’t really control them. There are only a few things I can control. And of course, when it comes to live performance, to a match, you cannot control anything.

Working with athletes off the court is easy, in comparison. Feels familiar. It’s similar to working with models or actors. But when it came to actual tennis performance — sports photography itself — I think it took me many years. I was shooting matches because I had access, and because I loved tennis, but if I’m honest, at first I was often sitting courtside watching more than photographing. I was frustrated  that I couldn’t stand anywhere different from the other photographers, frustrated that I had the same access, the same two angles, that I couldn’t move between points, that I always wanted to be somewhere else. In the beginning, it was actually worse than regular sports photography because I didn’t even have the right lenses and I didn’t fully know how I wanted to shoot. I play tennis, so I understand the sport deeply, but I still couldn’t get the angle I wanted because I simply didn’t have the access to it. What I knew was this: for me, a good sports photograph cannot only show action. It also has to show the person. And the person, coming from fashion, also has to look good. Even if they are screaming, they have to be screaming in a beautiful way. You have to catch them in the right place, in the right composition. It cannot just be a distant document, and long lenses in sports photography, for me, often create too much distance. They place you in the position of an observer who is far away, never part of the action. There is something deeply impersonal in that. It feels like you are standing on a balcony, photographing a neighbour across the street. You are almost sneaking into something, but you are not really there. That was my biggest frustration.

It took time to figure out how I could make images that didn’t feel like that. I would sneak into the stands, try different positions, use different lenses, different crops, different edits. Slowly, I started to understand. But honestly, it took maybe three or four years. I was on tour, I was making good images, of course, but I still wasn’t really happy with my sports photography.”

The break point

“The breakthrough came in 2024, at Roland-Garros in Paris. It was raining and the matches had stopped. I was passing by a court and I saw Marta Kostyuk, the Ukrainian player. She was wearing this beautiful green Wilson dress. I was looking at her thinking how beautiful she was and somehow the outfit felt perfect. That green dress, on the wet red clay, sitting in the middle of this interrupted rainy match suddenly made something click in my head. I photographed the entire match, from beginning to end. Then I went very deep into the edit. I realised that was how I needed to do it. I made a whole series from that match. Wilson loved it, the feedback was huge, and that was really the moment.

For me, a strong tennis photograph is not just about having a beautiful player who looks like a model. That’s not the point. What matters is that the whole aesthetic comes together. The outfit has to be right. The colour of the outfit has to work with the surface. The player’s style has to fit the personality. Everything has to align. All these small elements come together like a puzzle. And when they do, then I know I have a beautiful tennis picture. When I arrive at a tournament and the court has a very specific colour, the player is wearing something that works perfectly with it — the right colour, the right fit, the right feeling — suddenly I have the same tools I used to have in fashion. I can create something that is more than just a sports picture. It’s almost as if I had styled it myself. That’s why the work looks different.”

Searching

“I think that when you come from fashion, you are always — almost unconsciously — looking for beauty. It’s actually funny, because now when I photograph tournaments and players during competition, the images could look as if they were staged, as if they were carefully directed shoots. But they are real tournaments. That’s what I find so fascinating: the beauty is there, visible to everyone, and yet somehow almost nobody sees it.

For me, that is incredibly exciting. It’s so difficult to find something that nobody has done before, and I still get a thrill from the fact that I can be standing there, photographing a match at the same time as everyone else, and then the final image can be completely different. I’m not saying better or worse — just radically different. That is because my purpose is different from theirs. I also have the luxury of time in the edit, which they often don’t. They are shooting for press agencies, It’s a completely different framework. For me, editing is an essential part of the work. It’s honestly very intense. It usually takes me about a week to recover from a tournament, physically and mentally. The days are long, I carry all my gear myself, and it’s a constant mix of adrenaline, movement, and pressure. There’s barely any time to slow down or take care of yourself. During matches, I stay completely locked in for 2–3 hours, and some days I shoot four or more matches. Sometimes it takes a few rounds to really get what I’m looking for. And then the editing begins, going through every frame, almost like rewatching the match all over again in zoom.

People sometimes think that maybe I shoot thousands of images and then just hope for one lucky frame, crop it tightly, add some filter, and that’s it. That is not what I do at all. When I come to a match, I already know the player. I know the angle. I know whether her or his more photogenic side is the left side. I wait until the player is on the right side of the court, in the right light. I know the gestures I am looking for. I know the small details. I wait for those moments, because I already know what I’m looking for. You have to learn to be incredibly patient. You cannot tell the player what to do. You just have to hope that the moment you have already seen in your mind — almost in your dreams — will actually happen.”

Learning

“I learned a lot from tennis and tennis players about my own life. Then there is the community; I made a lot of new friends through tennis. It’s a huge world of people who love the game in the same obsessive way. I don’t know if it is the same in other sports, but with tennis I feel like you are either completely obsessed or not at all. There is no middle ground. You live for it. You travel with your rackets. You watch tennis. You dress like a tennis player. You are crazy for it — or you are not in it at all. Every tennis person I know is like that.

As I got closer to professional tennis, and started working in that world more seriously, I also began to understand something else: how quickly you can rise, and how quickly you can fall. In tennis, those ups and downs are everyday reality. And I realised that artists live exactly the same way. In a creative life, you make something — an album, a film, a body of work, a campaign — and maybe suddenly everybody cares. Then you make three more things and nobody cares. 

You have to reinvent yourself constantly. If you don’t, you can sit on your old success and talk about the exhibition you had twenty years ago, or the Vogue cover you once shot. But for me, whatever happened yesterday is already in the past. I’m always looking forward. And from sport I learned that this is exactly the same battle.”

Realizing

“Tennis is an individual sport, and being an artist is also an individual sport. On set I can have twenty people around me, but in the end, I am the one taking the picture. Tennis is the same. You can have a great coach and a full team around you, but when the match starts, you are the one making the decisions.

And then there is the pressure. That is something I think people in art don’t talk about enough: The mental pressure. I have felt it all my life, and I am fifty now, and I feel like only now I’m starting to understand how to deal with it. All my life I felt this pressure to create, to create something interesting, to make another beautiful shoot, to be the best, the most creative, the most relevant. You feel that pressure constantly, because you are in competition with so many talented people around the world. And again, just like in sport, sometimes you have to let go. That is another thing I learned from athletes. You cannot always win. 

That’s why I love to portray the losing moments too. For me, that is the most important part of the game. If one hundred people enter a tournament, only one of them will win. Ninety-nine will lose. So in a way, it is a sport of losing. Their real job is not to learn how to win — because only one person gets that reward — but to learn how to lose. So why is no one showing that? Why is the moment of defeat always hidden? You lose, you disappear, no one speaks to you. That is where it becomes interesting for me. That is where I want to be: when you are crying on the bench, when you smash your racket back in the tunnel, when you are angry, disappointed. Those are the moments I’m trying more and more to capture. They are very difficult to get, because in tennis as in sports, for some reason, those are exactly the moments athletes hide most.”

Helping Women sports

“I feel that women athletes in all sports deserve to be portrayed more beautifully. Athletes are almost always photographed in action, and that action is usually not captured in a very intentional way. 

When I photograph action, I really try to make them look beautiful — not artificially, but truthfully. So that you can see the person behind the athlete. So that you can see the woman. And of course also the emotions. I think, as a woman, I probably understand women’s emotional landscape better than I understand men’s. I spent my whole career in fashion working mostly with women. Even in my work with actors, I was always more drawn to women than to men. I don’t know why exactly, but I think I need to feel emotionally connected to the subject I photograph, and maybe because I am a woman too, I feel that connection more naturally.

Men’s sport already receives so much attention. I want to help women more. Because for women, whether you are an athlete or an artist, the foundation is not exactly the same as it is for men. Family, children, everything else life can ask from you, to be an independent artist, or a female athlete, it’s hard. I would like to elevate women’s sports in general. I love horse riding, for example, because I used to ride. Swimming. Track and field is so beautiful. I would love to bring to those worlds what I have tried to bring to tennis.”

The next serve

“This year, I’m continuing to shape my first major women’s tennis book, COURT SUPREMES, a deeply personal project. In parallel, I’m collaborating with Lacoste, and have a beautiful project with Wilson. We are trying to do something that, honestly, no brand has done before: creating campaign imagery for the brand during live matches. We did Indian Wells and Miami together, and I’m trying to push fashion aesthetics even further into tennis match content. Nobody else is really doing that, because there is no fashion photographer on tour. And I think there is also no one else who has both that fashion eye from thirty years of work, and now also eight years on tour, plus a real understanding of the sport and personal relationships with the players. I’m creating visuals that are very different from typical sports photography, and the response right now is actually huge.

Now that I have more experience on tour and know many of the players personally, I feel more confident, but it’s still very demanding. Access, travel logistics, long match days, and carrying heavy gear on my own can be challenging. At the same time, I feel that visually, there’s so much more to explore in tennis marketing, and I’m really trying to push those boundaries.  I’m also working with athletes outside the court, which for me is essential. I want to show them as people — with lives, personalities, style. Many of them are into fashion and players have access to major brands, but still there is so much that could be done in a more thoughtful and beautiful way. I’m trying. It’s a long-term project, of course. But I feel like this year is a real breakthrough moment for me, because now I have the right kind of environment around me.”