Josef Sudek

Munich: Kehayoff, 1999. Quarto. (13 x 10 1/4 inches). First English language edition of the 1995 Czech original, 405pp, many reproduced photographs and scholarly essays. Publisher's boards with inset pictorial label, glassine dustwrapper, and cardboard slipcase. Fine copy.

Collection of Josef Sudek's most important works. Dubbed the "poet of Prague," Sudek was one of the most important and celebrated of Czech photographers.

Sudek was born in Kolín, Bohemia. He worked as a bookbinder before being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front during the First World War. In 1916, his right arm was wounded which led to the limb being amputated at the shoulder. After returning from war, he studied photography for two years in Prague under Jaromír Funke. With his army disability pension, he was able to devote his time to making art and exploring different photographic styles. Sudek pushed boundaries in his work and argued for photography to move forward from the 'painterly' style predominant at the time; this led to a local camera club expelling him. Sudek is often described as a modernist photographer, but this is only accurate for a few 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. His personal photography, however, is better characterised as 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, and the window-glass that led to his garden. He went on to photograph the crowded interior of his studio. 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. Anna Fárová was a Czech art historian who specialized and catalogued Czech and Czechoslovak photographers, including Frantisek Drtikol and Josef Sudek. She was one of the pioneers writing on history of photography. Her publishing activities helped to establish photography as an art discipline within the country. The present work chronicles the photographer's life from his early years in Bohemia, his time in the war, his journey as a photographer and the most important series of work by Sudek. The photographs reproduced here are accompanied by Fárová's sympathetic and sensitive prose and excerpts from letters written by Sudek himself.