Josef Sudek Czech, 1896-1976

Josef Sudek (1896–1976) was one of the most singular photographers of the twentieth century and arguably the greatest to emerge from Czechoslovakia. Known as the poet of Prague, he spent six decades photographing a single city, working at night, in fog and beneath falling snow. Yet some of his most intimate images look no farther than the rain-streaked window of his studio, where a glass, an egg, a piece of bread or a rose on the sill became the subject of sustained contemplation. Working one-handed with heavy view cameras, he printed exclusively by contact, producing photographs of extraordinary stillness and a sensibility all his own.

Born in Kolín, Bohemia, Sudek trained as a bookbinder and initially pursued photography as an amateur. Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915, he was wounded on the Italian front in 1916. His right arm was amputated at the shoulder, and he spent three years in military hospitals, where he photographed fellow convalescents. He left with a disability pension and the determination to become a photographer. From 1922 to 1924, he studied at the State School of Graphic Arts and subsequently founded the Czech Photographic Society with Jaromír Funke and Adolf Schneeberger.

Sudek opened his studio on Újezd in 1927 and, throughout the 1930s, worked commercially for the publisher Družstevní práce and its Krásná jizba shop. There, he photographed glassware and household objects designed by Ladislav Sutnar, arranging them in carefully ordered compositions that reflected the functionalist aesthetic. Decades later, the glassware itself would become a subject of his personal work. During the German occupation, Sudek abandoned commercial photography to devote himself entirely to his own practice. His St. Vitus Cathedral series, made between 1924 and 1928 amid the dust and shafts of light of the cathedral under reconstruction, had already established his reputation, and he was appointed official photographer to the city of Prague.

In 1940, after seeing a contact print of an American photograph, Sudek abandoned enlargement altogether, printing directly from his negatives for the remainder of his life. His prints therefore retained the dimensions of the negatives, which he made with cameras in formats as large as 30 × 40 centimeters. The studio-window still lifes he began during the occupation, when restrictions on travel confined him largely to his immediate surroundings, became a central thread in his work for the rest of his life. In the Labyrinths series, the accumulated objects and clutter of his studio become an intricate world of their own. His panoramic photographs culminated in Praha panoramatická (1959), a collection of 144 views of the city.

Sudek lived by choice in a modest wooden studio on Újezd, in a building resembling social housing. Its simplicity afforded him the freedom to work, while his sister Božena helped maintain the household. He hosted Tuesday evening gatherings devoted to music, amassed an obsessive collection of records and never married. Having experienced the consequences of war firsthand, he felt a particular affinity for the poor and, from the 1920s onward, photographed the harsher outskirts of Prague. Under the German occupation, landscape photography could carry the risk of a capital offence; after 1948, the authorities viewed his independent practice with suspicion. His opportunities to exhibit abroad remained limited, and his first solo exhibition in the United States did not take place until 1974, at George Eastman House.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented Sudek’s work in Songs and the Sky (2016), Inscribed (2015), Night (2011) and DISCOVERIES (2010).