THE BOY HOLDS HIS BLACKENED PALM TOWARD THE CAMERA. Soot rings his eyes. Behind him, two plumes of factory smoke billow into the choked sky. Soon it will begin to rain.

"The raindrops were black," says Antonin Kratochvil, who took the photograph.

It's a June morning in Manhattan, and a barefoot Kratochvil, 62, is lounging on a white couch in the Tenth Avenue loft he shares with his fourth wife, Gabriela, and two of his three sons. This is an uncommon moment of repose for a man who's so tightly coiled and peripatetic that he's known as "the Bouncing Czech." Family chaos swirls all around him, the floor a minefield of dump trucks belonging to his 19-month-old son, Gavyn. Gabriela, a willowy blonde 20 years younger than her husband, is simultaneously sautéing chicken at the stove, captioning photographs at her desk, and preparing to wake their teenage son, Wayne.

Kratochvil, oblivious, flips through photographs he took in Eastern Europe in 1991, after the fall of Communism. He pauses over this boy with the soot-ringed eyes, who was living in the Transylvanian town of Copsa Mica, one of the most polluted places on earth. "I empathize with people who are being fucked," he says. "When I photograph them, I am photographing myself."

Coming from anybody else, that would sound grandiose, but Kratochvil has an innate understanding of what his subjects go through, because he's lived it. He spent his early childhood in a Czech labor camp and grew up in Communism's grip. After he fled Czechoslovakia, at the age of 19, he wandered Europe illegally for years, in search of refugee status, was conscripted by the French Foreign Legion, and later deserted the brutal army. He drifted to Amsterdam and then Hollywood and built a career as a photojournalist, doing what came naturally: searching out the places where conflict and suffering were rife.

The world is full of bold photographers who earn their keep by traveling to rough regions. Kratochvil towers above them all, in large part because his extraordinary background gives him a preternatural cool—not to mention credibility—that can't be taught. "In what we do, the most important faculties are instinct and intuition," says photojournalist Chris Anderson, who calls Kratochvil his mentor. "Antonin is the embodiment of instinct. His persona is that of an ogre, but he is frighteningly intelligent, the most astute observer of human behavior I know."

During his 35-plus years in the field, Kratochvil has traveled to radioactive Chernobyl, blood-diamond mines in Sierra Leone, the Niger Delta, Pakistan in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Darfur, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In the past two years, he's navigated the Zambezi River to follow malaria's ravages and been airlifted to remote U.S. military bases in the Philippines to photograph Special Forces units.

In a few days, Kratochvil will travel to Prague to act in a film for the first time, playing the lead role—appropriately, an artist in exile—in a new project by Czech director Jan Hrebejk. He's grown his sandy hair long, and a new, grizzled beard sprouts from his round face. He's missing a chunk of his left thumb. When I ask him what happened, his blue eyes twinkle wickedly. Kratochvil's device for deflecting serious questions is ribald humor, and he claims he lost the thumb while having sex with a virgin. "She clamped down," he says.

His two-bedroom loft looked different 20 years ago, when Gabriela first arrived. She met Kratochvil in Czechoslovakia when she was 17 and a close friend of his oldest son, Michael. Their romance started four years later, when she was 21. When she moved to New York to be with Kratochvil, the loft was raw space—really raw. There wasn't much in it but a table piled high with negatives. Kratochvil slept in a sleeping bag. Like a gentleman, he offered Gabriela his spare.

Despite his gunslinger's slouch toward life, Kratochvil is dead serious about his work and what drives it. His freedom is his god. "I struggled all my life for freedom. I don't know what the fuck it is besides that it is a responsibility," he says, meaning responsibility to those he left behind. "I owe it to them because I got out, and I have to go back." That sounds like survivor's guilt, but he insists it isn't. "I have no guilt," he says. "I'm a different beast."