Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (March 17, 1896 - September 15, 1976) was a legendary Czech photographer. He was born in the industrial town of Kolin, Bohemia, at a time when a Czech nation was just a romantic dream.

Originally a bookbinder by trade, he was badly injured in 1916 during action by the Hungarian Army on the Italian Front of the First World War. He was given a camera afterwards; although he had no previous experience with photography and was one-handed due to an amputation. He learned photography for two years in Prague from 1922, under the tuitition of Jaromir Funke. His Army disability pension gave him some leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic Pictorialist style, but always pushed at the boundaries of that form - he was expelled from a local camera club for arguing about the need to move forwards from 'painterly' photography. This led to Sudek founding the progressive Czech Photographic Society in 1924. Despite only having one arm, he always used large bulky cameras, managing to work with the aid of assistants.

His photography is sometime said to be modernist. But this is only true of a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography 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 cathederal. During and after the Second World War Sudek created haunting night-scapes and panoramas of Prague, photographed the wooded landscape of Bohemia, 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).

His first show in the West was at George Eastman House in 1974. He published 16 books during his life, now affordable to only the richest collectors.

He became known as the "Poet of Prague". Sudek never married, and was always known as a shy and retiring person - he never appeared at the openings of his own exhibitions, and few people appear in his photographs. Despite the privations of the war and Communism, he kept a renowned record collection of classical music.

Life

Josef Sudek was born in 1896 in Kolin in Bohemia during the reign of Emperor Francis Joseph II, Emperor of Holy Roman EmpireFranz Josef, when Bohemia was a Kingdom in the Austro- Hungarian Empire. Josef's father, a house painter, apprenticed his son to a bookbinder; a fellow worker introduced the young man to photography He was drafted into the Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm. Infection set in and eventually surgeons removed his arm at the shoulder. During his convalescence in an Army Hospital, he began photographing his fellow inmates.. For three years, he was a patient in a veteran's hospital; it was there, during his recuperation, that he first began photographing in earnest. He produced several albums of pictures - including landscapes showing splintered trees and other war damage - during his almost three years of war service..Josef Sudek was the founding member of clubs that rejected the traditional school of photography, such as Photoclub Prague and the Czech Photographic Society. Roughly in 1920s he started digressing from the mainstream of modern photography both in terms of style and technique. In 1970s the world started recognizing his art, especially the USA, as one of the major figures in the subjectivization of modern photography.

The years from his leaving the veteran's hospital around 1920 until 1926 were restless years for Sudek. He could not take up his trade of bookbinding. After settling in Prague, he took photographs for small commissions. He joined the Amateur Photography Club and struck up a friendship with Jaromir Funke, a well-educated, vocal, young photographer with advanced aesthetic theories concerning photography. In 1922, Sudek enrolled in the School of Graphic Arts in Prague and received an old-school, formal education in photography. Two main subjects occupied his attention with his camera: his former fellow-patients, the invalids in the veteran's hospital, and the reconstruction of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague then in progress. Occasionally he returned to his native Kolin to photograph the leisure life in the parks of the city. Still, he was unsettled, apparently not yet reconciled to his loss. And he was contentious.

After his discharge, Sudek studied photography for two years in a school for graphic art in Prague. the State School of Graphic Arts he was taught by one of the best known older Czech photographers who introduced him to pictorialism, but, along with the other leading young photographers he quicly became absorbed in a modernist approach.where he studied with Karel Novak. Novak introduced his students to the work of Edward Weston, but it was the pictures of Clarence White, with his use of a soft-focus lens to produce diffused highlights and a mood of romanticism that were a more immediate influence on his early work. However, along with Funke and the other young Czech modernists with whom he founded the Czech Photographic Society in 1924, Sudek was soon to renounce such 'artistic' effects, becoming a part of the 'new wave' of modern photography in Europe.

Between a disability pension and intermitment work as a commercial photographer, Sudek made a living. In 1933, he held his first one-man show in the Krasnajizba salon. Since 1947, he has published eight books. In the early 1950's, Sudek acquired an 1894 Kodak Panorama camera whose spring-drive sweeping lens makes a negative 10 cm x 30 cm. He employed this exotic format to make a stunning series of cityscapes of Prague, published in 1959.

The fascination with light and mood was however to permeate his lifetime's work,

Sudek soon became sucessful commercially working as house photographer for the influential magazine produced by the Prague artists, as well as in advertising and other projects. and also one of the leaders in Czech artistic circles. The Nazi invasion of 1939 brought much of the cultural life of Prague to a halt; forced in on himself, Sudek brooded over his work and became captivated by the quality obtainable from contact prints - and from this time on hardly ever enlarged a negative. He also began a great deal of experimentation with printing papers and effects, creating a very different style of printing to that advance in America by 'straight photographers' such as Ansel Adams. Sudek's work was often dark and moody; he was not afraid to make use of some very limited tonalities.

The Nazi invasion in 1939 led Sudek to withdraw very much into himself. He started intensive experiments in printmaking which was to be an important aspect of this work from this time on, concentrating on the use of very dark (and often low contrast) images, sometimes on toned paper and at times using non-silver processes. After this date, almost his entire work - commercial and personal - was contact printed, from negatives on a wide range of mainly elderly cameras.

After the war, Sudek had been joined in his studio by a young Czech Jew who had survived the Nazi concentration camps and wanted to become a photographer, Sonja Bullaty. she struggled to keep pace with her dynamic boss, much her senior and her unwitting mentor. She was still bewildered by the trauma of the War but she knew she wanted to be a photographer. Over a thirty year period, Sudek sent her selections of his prints: more than 300 all told. It was Bullaty who, when she emigrated to America, took Sudek's work and made it known outside of the Iron Curtain

Sudek's pictures often play on the lower tones of the photographic scale, full of mystery and darkness. He was not afraid to produce prints with a very limited tonal scale. His small, unorthodox and intensely personal pictures were often dismissed by photographic critics attuned as they were to the kind of full-scale print we associate with the work of Ansel Adams and the American 'straight photography' tradition. His work has an earthy and elemental quality; it is intense and dramatic, full of emotion. It reflects a preoccupation which has a uniquely Central European origin, and which was also the seed bed for Freud and Kafka. . By the time of his death, his output in Czechoslovakia totalled 16 books and monographs.

Sudek's individualism did not fit in with the new post-war Czech Socialist Republic, but fortunately the strong artistic tradition of the country meant that there were many mavericks in the establishment who supported his work, and it continued to be published. Finally he was to become the first photographer to be honoured by the Republic with the title of 'Artist of Merit'. He died, still keen to do more work, at the age of 80 in 1976.

Although his first panoramic picture was made during his was service around 1916, it was around 1950 that he started to work seriously in this area, mainly with an 1899 Kodak Panoram panoramic camera, which produced prints that were 10 cm by 30 cm (about 4" x 12"). Perhaps his finest book, Panoramas of Prague, (1959) contained almost 300 panoramas from Prague and the surrounding area. Like most of his books it was published only in his native country.

Josef Sudek by Charles Sawyer

Sudek's work first appeared in America in 1974 when the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, gave him a retrospective exhibition. The same year Light Gallery in New York City showed an exhibition of his photographs.

In spite of his disability, Sudek always used large format cameras and from the 1940's on he made only contact prints. He worked without assistants in the open air in city and countryside. His hunched figure supporting a huge wooden tripod was a familiar sight in Prague. Although he never married and was rather shy, he was not a recluse and was renowned for his weekly soirees for listening to classical music from his vast record collection. Sudek died quietly and without suffering or illness in mid-September 1976 in Prague.

Together with his friend Funke, he was expelled from the Photography Club for his impatient opposition to those who stood firmly by the then entrenched techniques of painterly affectations. The two upstarts gathered other like-minded photographers and formed the avant-garde Czech Photographic Society in 1924, devoted to the integrity ot the negative and freedom from the painters' tradition. Although Funke was the same age as Sudek, he had already studied law, medicine and philosophy. Sudek admired his superior education and intellectual capacities, and their discussions often led to ambitious projects.

Attempt to Reunite with his Arm

In 1926, Sudek ventured back into Italy with a group of friends that brought him near the spot where his life had been shattered nearly ten years earlier. Leaving his friends in the middle of the concert and wandering somnabulent until he reaches the place, he stays put for two months. His friends even alerted police when they could not account for him. Finally, having reached the catarsis but permanently estranged, he returns to Prague, where he immerses himself in his art.

Bullaty reproduced Sudek's description of his odyssey as follows: "…until we came to that place – I had to disappear in the middle of the concert; in the dark I got lost, but I had to search. Far outside the city toward dawn, in the fields bathed by the morning dew, finally I found the place. But my arm wasn't there – only the poor peasant farmhouse was still standing in its place. They had brought me into it that day when I was shot in the right arm. They could never put it together again, and for years I was going from hospital to hospital, and had to give up my bookbinding trade. The Philharmonic people… didn't reproach me, but from that time on, I never went anywhere, anymore, and I never will. What would I be looking for when I didn't find what I wanted to find?"

Sudek as a Person

Being very shy person, he never came to his own openings. He only made one exception, in the town of Roudnice, since he wanted to see how the photos were hung. After surveying the display and expressing approval, he retired to an upper floor to watch the festivity from above.

Later in life, he developed a close relationship with Dr. Peter Helbich. Sudek called him "student" and the doctor called him "chief". Helbich once noted that after Sudek lost his arm, he felt estranged from the rest of humanity, and his photography is a means to bridge the gap. "That is the reason for the melancholy in his photographs," said Helbichd, adding that had Sudek not lost his arm, he would not have become the artist he was."

Sudek loved music, especially the Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928). For years he would visit Janacek's native Hukvaldy in the eastern region of the Czech Republic Moravia to capture both the unique charm of the area and the composer's character through photographs of the countryside, the town, and the composer's home. He held classical music sessions for his friends.

His words on the relationship between the artist and their environment: „… the environment does have an impact on the person; even if you curse it, it will affect them. They can't extricate from it. His further comments, too vulgar to reproduce, made it clear that even if people try to ignore the environment, it won't help because they would be isolated within a certain space and would be hitting its boundaries, which would make them even madder. (p. 123). This might be a thinly veiled criticism of the life behind the Iron Curtain.

Sudek was also critical of himself, openly admitting his weaknesses, such as the reluctance to read, sloppiness, inability to bring a project to an end, and ammasing objects.

Style and Work

No photographer, save possibly Atget, was so devoted to the task of portraying a city, and with such stunning results, as Sudek. He couldn't have had a better subject than Prague; Prague is, to many, the jewel of Europe. Prague was considered the heart of the continent. Gothic, Rennaissance, and Baroque architecture. In the Prologue to her book (p. 14), Sonja Bultaty tells an anecdote about helping Sudek photograph Prague. It portrays the special relationship between him and the city. in one of the Romanesque halls, deep below the spires of the cathedral [St. Vitus] - it was dark as in catacombs - A ray of sun had entered the darkness and both of us were waving cloths to raise mountains of dust 'to see the light,' as Sudek said. Obviously he had known that the sun would reach here perhaps two or three times a year and he was waiting for it.

His workman-like attitude applied not only to the purely technical side of things but to the aesthetics of his camera work as well. Nowhere does this show so clearly as in his panoramic photos. The unusual format with its extreme proportions of 1 x 3 and the special distortions caused by the sweeping lens are extremely demanding, like the constraints of a sonnet. Yet like any set of artistic constraints, the peculiar requirements of the panoramic photo offer opportunities not found elsewhere. Sudek never tired of exploring the possibilities of the photographic sonnets he could make with his antique mechanism whose shutter speeds were marked simply "fast" and "slow". With it he gave us a geodesic feeling for the country-side which far surpasses anything we get from isolated views, and in Prague itself he showed how the River Vltava is an integral part of the city and how the labyrinthian quality of the city is offset by its broad open spaces. Before the horizontal panorama had yieided all its secrets, Sudek turned the camera on its side and gave us vertical panoramas!

The systematic approach, and the dogged aesthetic experimentation of Sudek are akin to the working habits of Cezanne. But these alone are insufficient to make great art or even good art. Sudek's devotion to work may have integrated his shattered life but it could not have offered him the spiritual redemption he was seeking; only his aesthetic quest could bring this. It is the struggle for spiritual redemption through his aesthectic quest that gives Sudek's best photographs their true power. Two qualities characterize his best work: a rich diversity of light values in the low end of the tonal scale, and the representation of light as a substance occupying its own space. The former, the diversity of light values, requires very delicate treatment of the materials, especially the negative, but also the paper (Sudek used silver halide papers in the main). The latter, the portrayal of light as substance, is a more original trait then his tonal palette, which one sees in occasional prints of other photographers.

Flaubert once expressed an ambition to write a book which would have no subject, "a book dependent on nothing external ... held together by the strength of its style." Photographers have sometimes expressed parallel aspirations to make light itself the subject of their photographs, leaving the banal, material world behind. Sudek has come closer than any other photographer to catching this illusive goal. His devices for this effect are simple and highly poetic: the dust he raised in a frenzy when the light was just right, a gossamer curtain draped over a chair back, the mist from a garden sprinkler, even the ambient moisture in the atmosphere when the air is near dew point. The eye is usually accustomed to seeing not light but the surfaces it defines; when light is reflected from amorphous materials, however, perception of materiality shifts to light itself. Sudek looked for such materials everywhere. And then he usually balanced the ethereal luminescence with the contra-bass of his deep shadow tonalities. The effect is enchanting, and strongly conveys the human element which is the true content of his photographs.

For, throughout all his photography, there is one dominant mood, one consistent viewpoint, and one overriding philosophy. The mood is melancholy and the point of view is romanticism. And overriding all this is a philosphic detachment, an attitude he shares with Spinoza. The attitude of detachment that characterizes Sudek's art accounts for both its strength and weakness: the strength which lies in the ideal of utter tranquility and the weakness which is found in the paucity of human intimacy, Some commentators find Sudek's photos mysterious but I think this is a mistake: the air of mystery vanishes once we see in Sudek's photography a person's private salvation from despair.

Josef Sudek’s style of enigmatic reality correlated more to Surrealist and Magic Realist paintings than to the popular photographic styles of his time. Throughout his life, Sudek remained faithful to his own stylistic and emotional proclivities, particularly in his prescient use of blurred images and in his unique expressions of light and shadow. Like Eugene Atget, his counterpart in France, he delved into the essence of his environment. However, whereas Atget reached for the sociological realities of the city, Sudek’s mysterious photographs derived from a more subjective place. He was, for the most part, a loner, devoted to introspection and explorations of his soul. He believed that symbolic form equates with inner emotions, a philosophy shared by many painters of his era.

In his public explorations, he concentrated on photographing historic buildings, public squares and churches such as St. Vitus’ Cathedral. There he focused on architectural details, shooting from a variety of angles and waiting for the moment when the light was exactly right. The result was a series of distinctive perspectives.

He was attracted also to airy spaces and changing light in nature, a sensibility that ties him to the Impressionists. In his Kolin Island series, atmospheric photographs of people in the countryside capture specific moments in time and strata of society as well. Blurred figures dissolve in an atmospheric haze, frozen in time. Rays of sunlight and deep shadows create a dreamlike mood, as though the observer has wandered into a sequence of a surreal Felini movie. Sudek’s lyrical transformations of landscapes often came about from exhaustive and complicated preparations. Always waiting for just the right moment, each object, person or foliage is caught within it’s own atmosphere.

In his Garden series, haunting images stem from ill-defined values of tonal gradations that move from dark grays to blacks. Gnarled and lacy structures of trees and thickly growing plants are either bathed in radiating light or darkly silhouetted.

As a result of Sudek’s reclusive tendencies, a large portion of his photographs were shot from the vantage point of his studio window in Prague. The window acts as a reflective backdrop, framing artfully arranged objects such as onions, pebbles or flowers. He was particularly fond of the way glass objects refracted light in exciting ways. Sudek liked to view these as homages to the carefully arranged still-lifes of Chardin and old Dutch masters. His later, more modernist still-lifes were beautiful studies of form, light and shadow, but they lacked the soul of these earlier ones.

He often shot the window through a curtain of dew, ice or rain drops, a distorting barrier between internal and external worlds. In The Window of My Studio, for example, a barely distinguishable figure is seen through a dusky veil of rainy condensation. The dark indeterminacy creates a barrier between the observer and the observed. This implied sense of mystery is deliberate, a way to kindle the imagination of the viewer.

Sudek’s excursions into the the realm of imagination reflects the Czech Poetism movement of the 1920s. However, he always remained true to his own inner visions and his desire to portray a world that was created from within himself. His remoteness, his need to remain close to nature, his spirituality and his attention to detail are all reflected in the photographs on view here. Most evident is his inimitable patience. His cycles of themes such as still-lifes and landscapes often took as long as ten years to complete.

Artistic Evolution

His photos from 1920 until the year of his crisis are markedly different, both in style and content, from those following. In the series from the veteran's hospital taken in the early 1920's, his former fellow-invalids are seen as ghostly silhouettes shrouded in clouds of light - lost souls suspended in Limbo. In the photos of Sunday pleasure-seekers in his native Kolin from the same period, the people are seen from 6 distance, through soft focus, in social clusters, usually with their backs to the camera, suggesting the closure of the ordinary social world to outsiders. His extended study of the reconstruction of St. Vitus begun in 1924, two years before his crisis, and completed in 1928, with the publication of his first book, can all too easily be taken as a metaphor for his personal struggle to reconstruct his own life.

After 1926, Sudek began to find his own personal style and come into his full powers as an artist. Gone is the haze of soft focus, and gone too, are the people - even most of his cityscapes show deserted streets. He turned his attention to the city of Prague with devotion and dedication that are rare even among the most committed artists. He succeeded to capture both the grandeur and the unpretentiousness of that lovely city. Yet, lovely as it still looks, through his lens it is empty. As if to compensate for the absence of the human factor in its customary place, Sudek personified the inanimate. The woods of Bohemia and Moravia projected on his view-screen were inhabitated by "sleeping giants", as he called them, huge dead trees that watched over the landscape like statues out of Easter Island. In his playful moods, Sudek toyed with masks and statuary heads, showing them as lovers, as grotesqueries, or even as gods. He found intimacy hard to achieve - perhaps because it was painful - not just in his interpersonal life but even under his viewing cloth. Its substitute came easily with inanimate objects. "I love the life of objects," he told one interviewer. "When the children go to bed, the objects come to life. I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects." He devoted endless hours to photographing special objects in various settings, particularly objects given to him by friends. He often called these photos "remembrances" of this or that person. It appears as if his personal rapport with the inanimate things he photographed began as an alternative to real intimacy with other persons and evolved into a means to bridge the gap that stood between him and the others.

As he came to his artistic maturity, immersion in work and devotion to a high standard of craftsmanship became the dominant motifs of Sudek's life. In 1940, he saw a 30 x 40 cm photograph of a statue from Chartres, which, he recognized, was not an enlargement but one made by the contact process. The print so impressed him for its rendering of the stone material that he vowed thereafter always to make contact prints. He said it was less the fineness of details he craved in contact prints, than their tonal variation. From then on he lugged view cameras as large as the 30 x 40 cm format (roughly 12 x 16 inches) around the steep streets of the Hradcany and Mala Strana sections of Prague, working with one hand, cradling the camera in his lap to make adjustments, using his teeth when his hand was insufficient.

Promotional and Publicity Photography

Třicátá léta 20. století jsou obdobím, kdy se Sudek nejvíce vzdaluje od podoby, která mu byla později kulturní veřejnosti přisouzena a do níž se tak rád stylizoval: v této době je především zakázkovým reklamním fotografem, na tehdejší poměry velmi drahým, a také cílevědomým živnostníkem, který si k vymáhání honorářů a podávání žalob na dlužníky dokonce najímá advokáta dr. Poppera… Jinými slovy, Sudek si v této době „čichl“ k reklamě, a i když tyto své „zálety“ později snižoval („Z řemeslnýho stanoviska to určitě něco dalo, ale nemohl jsem to dělat pořád. To by člověk zblbnul. Jakmile jsem to udělal, okamžitě jsem dělal zase svoje věci.“ Josef Sudek: O sobě, s. 36), dělal to vesměs s vkusem a osobitostí.

Reklamní a propagační fotografie vytvářel Josef Sudek ve 20. – 30. letech 20. století. V domácím kontextu je považován za průkopníka tohoto oboru s jedinečným autorským rukopisem.

Už roku 1926 Sudek navázal první pracovní kontakty s nakladatelstvím Družstevní práce (dále DP). Hlavní zájem soustředil na přípravu materiálů pro její propagační časopisy: Panoramu DP, Žijeme, Jak žijeme a Magazín DP, v němž byl Sudek v letech 1934-36 členem redakční rady. Časopis Žijeme byl vydáván Svazem Československého Díla společně s DP a „…věnován kvalitní práci, bytové kultuře a vůbec modernímu životu. Jeho účelem je sloužit propagaci vskutku moderních snah v praktickém životě.“. V roce 1928 Sudek poprvé fotografoval v michelské plynárně, později můžeme dokladovat spolupráci s mnoha dalšími firmami:Továrnou na čokoládu Orion, tiskárnou Lidových novin, dělnickým spolkem Včela, Železárnami a smaltovnami Otty Hofmanna v Hořovicích, Microphonou, firmou GEC, Ultraphonem, v druhé polovině 30. let pak s podniky strojírenské (katalog modelu Tatra 77) a textilní výroby. Zvláštní kapitolu v Sudkově pozůstalosti tvoří propagační snímky na Pilnáčkovo mýdlo, kosmetiku, ale i obuvnickou firmu Popper.

Josef Sudek se zabýval reklamou i organizačně, spolupracoval s řadou institucí a firem, které v 30. letech postupně prosazovaly účelnou a vkusnou obchodní propagaci.

Sudek in Dates

1896 - born on March 17 in Kolin.
1908 - begins studies at the Royal Bohemian Trade School in Kutna Hora.
1911- moves to Prague to work as a bookbinder's apprentice. Begins taking photos.
1915-1916 - fought in and took photographs on the Italian front of WWI. Lost his right arm.
1917 - due to his disability he is unable to continue bookbinding and concentrates on photography.
1920-1921 - becomes member of Prague Society of Amateur Photographers.
1922-1924 - studies photography at Prague Graphic Arts School.
1922-1927 - takes photographs of veterans at Prague's Invalidovna hospital.
1924 - founding member of the Prague Photographic Society.
1926 - travels to Italy.
1928 - documents the reconstruction of St. Vitus Cathedral and publishes his first album of ten photographs for the 10th anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia.
1927-1936 - Works for Druzstevni prace, specializing in portraits, ads, and documentaries.
1932 - first exhibition in Prague.
1940 - stops enlarging negatives and focuses on contact prints.
1958 - moves to new studio in Uvoz near Prague.
1961 - the first photographer to receive the Artist of Merit award by the Czech government.
1966 - awarded the Order of Labor by the Czech government.
1976 - died on September 15t in Prague.

External links

English Language

Sawyer, Charles; April 1980 Josef Sudek Creative Camera, retrieved January 10, 2007
The Master of Photography Josef Sudek Website, retrieved January 10, 2007
Lahoda, Vojtech 2005 Chaos, Mess and Uncertainty: Josef Sudek and Surrealism Papers of Surrealism, retrieved January 10, 2007
Welles, Elenore; Josef Sudek Art Scene 2007, retrieved January 10, 2007
Directory of Notable Photographers Josef Sudek About, Inc. NYTimes Co. Retrieved January 10, 2007
Josef Sudek - Poet of Prague About, Inc. NYTimes Co., Retrieved January 10, 2007
Josef Sudek Fine Art Photography; Gallery & Forum, Retrieved January 10, 2007

Czech Language

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

Josef Sudek ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

History of "Josef Sudek"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.