In the upstairs café at Hlavní ­nádraží, Prague's main train station, droves of students, families and professionals wound their away along a massive banner eyeing photographs of 16 people who, for better or worse, have chosen a mobile life within Europe.

The display was organized by the Multicultural Center Prague and FAMU (Prague School for Film and Television) to acknowledge "The European Year of Workers' Mobility," using a team of 32 photographers and researchers who traveled with their subjects last summer. The result is an exhibit of larger-than-life photographs and a 150-page book that documents 16 wildly dissimilar lives, all sharing a common thread: living and working in a foreign country.

Visitors to the exhibit will find 25-year-old Stella standing in a sparkling field of green and yellow. A student from Ústí­ nad Labem, she spent the summer in Ireland to improve her English while working as a farmhand. She labored six days a week hauling, packing and "bed weeding," which meant lying on her stomach while dangling her arms through wooden slats as a tractor hauled her over an immense organic farm. For this she was paid 3 euros per hour ($3.96/84 Kč), instead of the Irish minimum wage of 7.30 euros, and lived on the farm in a tiny attic room that had previously belonged to long-term employees from Poland.

Statistically, Stella is an exception; not many Czechs seek employment abroad. Conversely, Multicultural Center Prague estimates that 10 percent of workers in Prague are migrants, mostly from Slovakia and Ukraine.

Jožo, who was trained as a livestock specialist, laments the loss of rural homestead life. This quiet longing is sharply defined in a series of black-and-white photographs of him at home in Ochtalov.

Still, Jožo feels fortunate to have a steady job that pays as much as 20,000 Kč per month, with shifts that allow him 10 days back home at regular intervals. Within the well-crafted text that accompanies the exhibit, Jožo speaks knowingly of other Slovaks, many who migrate illegally and are set up by unscrupulous middlemen who abandon them, unpaid, after weeks of employment.

Photographs of Ladislav don't focus on the one-room dormitory where he lives with three other Škoda workers, all of them relatives. Instead, we are privy to Ladislav's journey home, through the labyrinth of wooden huts that make up his Romany settlement, where young boys train dogs and men sit bare-chested playing the violin. We get to see Ladislav's home with its brightly painted walls, overhung with family portraits and crammed with people witnessing his proud return from the Škoda plant, where he adds to his 18,000 Kč monthly earnings by helping to recruit new employees.

It isn't just economics that inspires people to relocate; sometimes quality of life is at the heart of that decision. Sophie, a 35-year-old French native and Greig, 33, of Scotland, moved to Brno, South Moravia, several years ago after living in London. Their idyllic life is captured in a series of photos as the family celebrates a birthday and gathers for story time in a room bright with polished wooden floors.

Yet all is not well. As young families relocate, connections with extended members often fall off, and, sometimes, older parents are left feeling cheated out of the ties their generation once took for granted. Says Sophie's mother, Evelyne, who must endure a periodic bus ride from Paris to Brno to visit, "The hardest thing for me is not the fact that I can't see my daughter. I mean, she is a grown-up and has left the house. But I am missing my grandchildren and would like to have them with me."