Josef Sudek (17 March 1896, Kolín, Bohemia – 15 September 1976) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague.
Sudek's photography is sometimes 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.
Josef Sudek: “a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.”
Sudek, who lost his right arm in the First World War but nevertheless carried a panoramic box camera and tripod around Prague and the surrounding countryside, began to focus on still life after German troops occupied Prague in 1939.
He started shooting through the window of his studio, turning it into a scrim: fogged with condensation, feathered with frost, or streaked with trails of raindrops. He placed objects on the windowsill, turning it into “a theater of ordinary objects”.
Sudek’s still lifes combine solid, durable objects with the most ephemeral phenomena, light and shadow, moisture and reflections. In pictures like his Glass Labyrinths, he blurred the distinctions between light, glass, and water: all are translucent, all are veiled as though by breath, all leave permanent traces in the gelatin-silver print. Despite their softness and absence of strong contrasts, Sudek’s contact prints illuminate the tiny bubbles clinging to the sides of a glass of water, the flaking cracks in old paint, the separate filaments of feathers. Still life is an art of intimacy and nearness; it addresses the world within our reach, the things we touch, hold, smell, and taste. It brings us “tête-à-tête with things.”
