Josef Ehm Czech, 1909-1989

Josef Ehm (1909–1989) was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Czech photography. An artist, teacher and editor, he helped shape the photographic practice and thinking of an entire generation. His own work, rooted in New Objectivity, combined avant-garde approaches with exacting technical command. From the 1930s through the 1960s, he produced nudes, portraits, still lifes, landscapes and city views, while also undertaking the architectural and sculptural documentation that would occupy much of his professional life.

Born in Habartov, western Bohemia, on 1 August 1909, Ehm trained in commercial studios rather than at an academy. He completed his apprenticeship in 1928 under Karel Podlipný in Poděbrady, then worked at Fotochema in Hradec Králové and for Karel Stehlík. In 1931, he and Stehlík moved to Prague and established a partnership. It was there that Ehm met Ladislav Sutnar, the influential designer who directed the State School of Graphic Arts.

In 1934, at the age of twenty-five, Sutnar appointed Ehm to the school alongside the retiring professor Karel Novák. When Novák left in 1935, Jaromír Funke assumed responsibility for the photography department, further advancing the principles of the New Vision and the Bauhaus within its teaching. Together, Ehm and Funke modernized the curriculum. Ehm taught at the school until 1946, returning from 1960 to 1967 and also taught briefly at FAMU, the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, from 1965.

Between 1939 and 1941, Ehm co-edited Fotografický obzor with Funke, a journal that had been published since 1893. He also worked with Eugen Wiškovský; the three photographers rank among the leading figures of the Czech interwar avant-garde. In 1935, Ehm helped prepare the book Photography Sees Surface. He contributed to Pestrý týden and other publications and exhibited in the Museum of Decorative Arts’ 1939 exhibition A Century of Czech Photography.

In December 1943, the publisher Národní práce issued Modern Czech Photography in a limited edition of fifty copies. Each album contained ten original photographs by Ehm, Funke, Miroslav Hák, Karel Plicka and Josef Sudek, with two signed prints by each photographer. In his preface, Karel Teige characterized the publication as an example of photogenic poetry. He later described Ehm’s work as classical realism—not a return to the past, but a renewal of photography’s essential traditions. The influence of Man Ray was evident in Ehm’s use of solarization in his nude studies.

From 1939 to 1969, Ehm worked primarily as a photographer documenting monuments. In the early 1950s, he was employed by the State Photogrammetric Institute, later the State Institute for the Care of Monuments and also worked for Prague’s state museums and galleries. In his monograph on Ehm, Jiří Mašín emphasized the photographer’s ability to render buildings and sculptures in ways that heightened their visual impact. Ehm’s photographs of historic towns, architecture and museum collections appeared in more than eighty books, many of which were subsequently published in other languages. Tens of thousands of his images also circulated as postcards, bringing his work to a broad public.

A businessman as well as an artist, Ehm maintained strict control over the reproduction rights to his photographs, even under socialism. He supplied institutions with prints while retaining his negatives. In 1982, he assembled photographs that had appeared in art-historical publications and donated them to the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences. He died in Prague on 8 November 1989, aged eighty.