Josef Sudek

By Anna Fárová Dubbed the “poet of Prague,” Josef Sudek (1896–1976) was one of the most important and celebrated of Czech photographers. Sudek produced his best work during his middle-aged years, having grown up and out of the rules of modernism and into a style of his own. Whereas his photographs from the 1930s are mainly a reflection of the external world, by the 1940s he was returning to himself, finding his own unique creative path. It was during this period that he made his most famous photograph, a view of the world seen through his studio window, the window ledge doubling as a stage for still-life objects―a setup which he repeated to great effect. Not even the pressures of World War II and the difficult postwar years―including the demands of socialist realism in the arts―interrupted the continuity of his oeuvre, documented in this back-in-print volume. Paperback154 pagesText in German and EnglishTorst; Bilungual edition, 20166.3 x 0.4 x 7 inchesISBN 9788072155064Artist Monographs, Photography

Josef Sudek (Fototorst)

Contributions by Timm RautertPhotographs by Josef Sudek Timm Rautert (born 1941) met Josef Sudek for the first time on a study trip to Prague in the spring of 1967. The photography student and the 71-year-old Sudek―who was arguably the most important Czech landscape and still-life photographer of the 20th century and a cult figure in his native country―instantly took to each other, and Rautert began photographing the artist in his studio and at his home. He accompanied him on his strolls in parks in Little Prague on the left bank of the Vltava river as he searched for adequate perspectives, and documented his work process inside and outside the darkroom. First published in 2008, the Sudek series, here compiled in this new volume, is an extraordinary chronicle of a fascinating personality and place in the run-up to the Prague Spring, and marks the beginning of Rautert’s career, during which the portrait and people at work were of particular importance to him.Hardcover96 pagesSteidl, 20169.7 x 0.6 x 11.1 inchesISBN 9783958291188Photography

Josef Sudek, Prague 1967

By Jan Rezác Although the Czech photographer Josef Sudek was mildly reclusive by temperament, and although his photography is commonly characterized as unpeopled (in favor of what he termed "the inanimate life of objects"), a sizable portion of his oeuvre is given over to portraits. In fact, the beginnings of Sudek's work are in portraiture, in his images of fellow patients at the veteran's hospital where he spent three years after the First World War. (It was here that Sudek's right arm was amputated after a battlefield injury, a misfortune which did not prevent him from using heavy, large-format cameras in the future.) Decades later, after he had cofounded the Czech Photographic Society in 1924 and established his signature neo-Romantic preoccupation with architectural Prague, he returned to the genre. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Sudek photographed close friends, among them the poet and Nobel Laureate Jaroslav Seifert, many painters and writers, but also scientists, doctors, politicians, architects, actors and other important public figures in Czechoslovakia. Portraits, the second volume of Sudek's collected photographs, gathers this body of work. In addition to a chronology of Sudek's life, it includes a complete bibliography and list of his exhibitions, as well as an interview with Jan Rezác, Sudek's colleague and an expert on his work. Hardcover96 pages Torst, 20089 x 0.6 x 11.3 inches ISBN 9788072153190Artist Monograph, Photography, Portraits

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Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Fototorst)

Josef Sudek, Prague 1967

Josef Sudek: Portraits

Shop at Neue Josef Sudek

Josef Sudek (Fototorst)

Josef Sudek, Prague 1967

Josef Sudek: Portraits

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Josef Sudek