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 during the reign of Emperor Francis Joseph II, Emperor of Holy Roman EmpireFranz Josef, when Bohemia was a Kingdom in the Austro- Hungarian Empire. His father, a house painter, apprenticed him 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 his arm had to be removed at the shoulder. During his three-year convalescence in the veterans hospital, he was photographing his fellow inmates; it was there that he first began photographing in earnest. He produced several albums of pictures, including landscapes showing splintered trees and other war damage.

After his discharge, he settled in Prague and took photographs on commission. He joined the Amateur Photography Club and struck up a friendship with Jaromir Funke, a well-educated, vocal, young photographer with advanced aesthetic theories. In 1922, Sudek enrolled in the School of Graphic Arts in Prague in a quest for formal education in the art of photography. Major "old school" Czech photographers were among his teachers, such as Karel Novak, who introduced his students to the most influential American photographer of the 20th century, Edward Weston, and his soft-focus pictorialism. 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 Sudek's early work. Along with the other leading young photographers he quickly became absorbed in the modernist approach and was the founding member of clubs that rejected the traditional school of photography, such as Photoclub Prague and the Czech Photographic Society.

However, along with Funke and the other young Czech modernists, he was soon to renounce such ‘painterly affectations’ and 'artistic' effects in favor of the 'new wave' of modern photography in Europe, although the fascination with light and mood would continue to permeate his work. For this, Funke and Sudek were expelled from the Photography Club. 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. Funke was the same age as Sudek but had already studied law, medicine and philosophy, and Sudek admired his superior education and intellectual capacities. Their discussions often led to ambitious projects.

Sudek soon became commercially successful working as a house an influential magazine produced by Prague artists as well as in advertising and other projects. He was one of the leaders in Czech artistic circles. In 1933, he held his first one-man show in the Krasna jizba salon.

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. From this time on he hardly ever enlarged a negative. He also began a great deal of experimentation with printing papers and effects, concentrating on the use of very dark (and often low contrast) images, sometimes on toned paper and at times using non-silver processes, creating a very different style of printing to that advanced in America by 'straight photographers' such as Ansel Adams. From that time on, almost his entire work—commercial and personal—was contact printed from negatives on a wide range of mainly elderly cameras. Sudek's work was often dark and moody; he was not afraid to make use of some very limited tonalities. For his distance from 'straight photography', Sudek’s small, unorthodox and intensely personal pictures were often dismissed by critics. His work has an earthy and elemental quality; it is intense and dramatic, full of emotion. It reflects a preoccupation of the Central European origin, which can be also traced in the works of Freud and Kafka.

After the war, he hired an assistant, Sonja Bullaty, a young Czech Jew who survived the Nazi concentration camps and wanted to become a photographer. She struggled to keep pace with her dynamic boss, still reeling from the trauma of the War, but over a thirty year period following her emigration to America, Sudek sent her more than 300 selections of his prints. It was Bullaty who opened his work to the world outside the Iron Curtain. In the early 1950's, he acquired an 1894 Kodak Panorama camera whose spring-drive sweeping lens makes a negative 10 cm x 30 cm, and employed this exotic format to make a stunning series of cityscapes of Prague, published in 1959. He started to occupy himself fully in the area of prints. Two main subjects occupied his attention: his former fellow patients, the invalids in the veterans hospital, and the ongoing reconstruction of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. Perhaps his finest book, Panoramas of Prague, (1959) contained almost 300 panoramas of Prague and the surroundings. Like most of his books, it was only published in his native country. Sudek's individualism did not fare well with Czechoslovakia’s communist regime. Fortunately, the strong artistic tradition of the country made it possible for him to practice his art through mavericks who supported his work, and it continued to be published. He was the first photographer to be honored by the country with the title of 'Artist of Merit'. He died, still keen to do more work, at the age of 80, having left behind 16 books and monographs. 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.

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’s Fame Reaches the World

His 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 held an exhibition of his photographs.

Sudek as a 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 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 weekly classical music soirees for his friends, drawing on his vast record collection.

He openly admitted his weaknesses, such as reluctance to read, sloppiness, inability to bring a project to an end, and hoardiness.

He said on the relationship between the artist and environment: „… the environment does have an impact on the person; even if you curse it, it will affect you. You can't extricate yourself from it."

Style

Cezanne, Atget, Flaubert, and Felini

Two qualities characterize his best work: a 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 requires very delicate treatment of the materials, especially the negative, but also the paper (Sudek used silver halide papers in the main). The latter is a more original trait than his tonal palette, seen occasionally in prints of other photographers.

He had a workman-like attitude, both in terms of technique and aestheticism; his panoramic photos are of extreme proportions of 1 x 3 meter, and the distortions caused by the sweeping lens are extremely demanding, but in the hands of the maestro, they yielded the desired effect. Sudek was a perpetual explorer of his antique camera whose shutter speeds were marked "fast" and "slow". With it he substituted a geodesic feeling for the countryside for isolated views and projected the Vltava River as an integral part of Prague. Seen through the lens of his camera, the city’s labyrinthine quality is offset by its broad open spaces. When photographing historic buildings, public squares and churches, he focused on architectural details, shooting from a variety of angles. The result was a series of distinctive perspectives. The systematic approach and the dogged aesthetic experimentation are reminiscent of the working habits of Cezanne.

Like Eugene Atget, his counterpart in France, Sudek was devoted to the task of portraying a city, and Prague offers aplenty with its exquisite Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture. He delved into the essence of his environment. However, whereas Atget depicted the sociological realities of the city, Sudek’s mysterious photographs fed on introspection and explorations of his soul. He believed that symbolic form equates with inner emotions, a philosophy shared by many painters of his era.

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. ref" Photographers strove to achieve this by making light the subject of their photographs, leaving the trite, material world behind. Sudek, with his employment of dust raised in a frenzy when the light was just right, a gossamer curtain draped over the back of the chair, the mist from a garden sprinkler, even the ambient moisture in the atmosphere when the air is near dew point, has come closer than any other photographer to capturing this illusive goal. He looked for such materials everywhere. Once, accompanied by Bullaty, he saw a ray of sun enter the darkness of the Romanesque halls below the spires of St. Vitus Cathedral and started waving cloths to raise mountains of dust 'to see the light ref. This sensibility ties him to the ImpressionismImpressionists. Rays of sunlight and deep shadows create a dreamlike mood, as though the observer has wandered into a sequence of a Surrealismsurreal Felini movie.

Czech Poeticism Movement

The ubiquitous melancholy and detachment with which the pictures were taken underscores tranquility on one hand and belittles human intimacy on the other. This style of enigmatic reality, the excursions into the the realm of imagination, correlated more to Surrealist and Magic Realism paintings than to the popular photographic styles of the age. It reflects the Czech Poetism movement of the 1920s but also the artist himself: his own inner visions of the world, spirituality, and nature.

Artistic Evolution

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.

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. 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

In 1930s, Sudek worked mostly as a photographer on commission, and ws very expensive, goal-oriented tradesman who did not heistate to hire an attorney to enforce royalties and file lawsuits against defaulters. very expensive 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.

Footnotes

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
http://www.edward-weston.com/edward_weston_biography.htm Edward Weston Biography the Edward Weston website

Czech Language

Kateřina Mahovská, December 13, 2006 "The Known Unknown Josef Sudek" Czech Culture Website, accessed January 12, 2007
"Josef Sudek, Photographer for Life" Sanquis Magazine for Medical Doctors, accessed January 12, 2007
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