Josef Sudek (17 March 1896 – 15 September 1976) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of
Prague.
Life
Sudek was born in
Kolín,
Bohemia
Bohemia ( ; cs, Čechy ; ; hsb, Čěska; szl, Czechy) is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech Republic. Bohemia can also refer to a wider area consisting of the historical Lands of the Bohemian Crown ruled by the Bohem ...
. He was originally a bookbinder. During the
First World War he was drafted into the
Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm in 1916 which led to the limb being amputated at the shoulder. After the war he studied photography for two years in
Prague under
Jaromír Funke
Jaromír Funke (1 August 1896 – 22 March 1945) was a leading Czech photographer during the 1920s and 1930s.
Early life
Funke was born to a wealthy family in house No. 238 in Skuteč on 1 August 1896, the son of Antonín Funke, Bohemian-German ...
. His army disability pension gave him leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic
Pictorialist style. Always pushing at the boundaries, a local camera club expelled him for arguing about the need to move forwards from 'painterly' photography. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras with the aid of assistants.
Sudek's photography is sometimes said to be
modernist. But this is only true of a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography, including contributions to the illustrated Prague weekly ''
Pestrý týden'' and thus worked "in the style of the times". Primarily, his personal photography is
neo-romantic.
His early work included many series of light falling in the interior of
St. Vitus Cathedral. During and after World War II Sudek created haunting night-scapes and panoramas of Prague, photographed the wooded landscape of
Bohemia
Bohemia ( ; cs, Čechy ; ; hsb, Čěska; szl, Czechy) is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech Republic. Bohemia can also refer to a wider area consisting of the historical Lands of the Bohemian Crown ruled by the Bohem ...
, and the window-glass that led to his garden (the famous ''The Window of My Atelier'' series). He went on to photograph the crowded interior of his studio (the ''Labyrinths'' series).
He first showed his work in "Five Photographers" at the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska/Lincoln in 1968. Then he showed at the
George Eastman House in 1974 and he published 16 books during his life.
Known as the "Poet of Prague", Sudek never married, and was a shy, retiring person. He never appeared at his exhibit openings and few people appear in his photographs. Despite the privations of the war and Communism, he kept a renowned record collection of classical music.
In recent years, his work has frequently been reproduced in books, making his work some of the most readily accessible to those interested in twentieth-century Czech photography.
In 1984 Sudek was posthumously inducted into the
International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.
Sudek in literature
In addition to conventional biographies of Sudek,
John Banville's ''Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City'' introduces the reader to the city through the photographic lens of Joseph Sudek. Banville relates how he became enlisted to smuggle Sudek's photographs to the United States and through his tale and the story of Sudek muses on the history of
Prague in its gravity and melancholy, torn by war and oppression. He re-creates the anxiety that must have faced the photographer in a city where, under
Nazi occupation,
landscape photography
Landscape photography shows the spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. Landscape photographs typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes ...
could be a mortal offense.
Sudek was used as a symbolic presence in Howard Norman's novel ''Devotion''. The protagonist, David Kozol, was a photographer and mentored under Sudek. David Kozol remarks on the melancholy that pervaded Sudek's work and a similar mood persists through the novel. Sudek figures symbolically in the novel; David Kozol's mother in law worked as a book binder and it was through apprenticeship to a book binder that Sudek became interested in photography. The characters seem to be symbolically injured or emotionally broken like the one armed Sudek and visual imagery figures prominently.
In 2006 the Dutch poet Hans Tentije published a bundle containing the poem: "''Met Josef Sudek op weg door Praag''", "On my way through Prague with Sudek". In nine parts the poet "helps" Sudek with his photography.
See also
*
Josef Sudek Gallery
*
4176 Sudek
4176 Sudek, provisional designation , is a Themistian asteroid from the outer regions of the asteroid belt, approximately in diameter. It was discovered on 24 February 1987, by Czech astronomer Antonín Mrkos at the Kleť Observatory in the Czech ...
(asteroid name for him)
*
The Josef Sudek Studio
The Josef Sudek Studio is a gallery bearing the name of the renowned Czech photographer Josef Sudek. This single-storey pavilion of only 61 square metres and located in the courtyard of the apartment buildings at no. 432 Újezd, Prague, is a repli ...
References
External links
Josef Sudek Studio (Ateliér Josefa Sudka)
Josef Sudek: A View of a Private World: Detailed Biography and Selection of Photographs'Odyssey To Sudek: Meeting and Photographing Josef Sudek, 1975''Photographs of the restored workshop of photographer Josef Sudek in Prague. The museum.'*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sudek, Josef
1896 births
1976 deaths
People from Kolín
Austro-Hungarian military personnel of World War I
Czech photographers