Trained as a bookbinder, Sudek lost his right arm on the Italian front in the First World War, which ironically led him to photography. He was able to study it at the State School of Graphic Arts as part of a scheme to help war invalids, and his achievements in this field were to make him famous.
Together with the photographers Jaromír Funke and Adolf Schneeberg, he founded the Czech Photographic Society in 1924 with the aim of establishing photography as an independent
artistic discipline. Just as the Prague Surrealist Group was being founded in 1934, Sudek was focusing on photographing zoomorphic tree roots, which became a favourite motif of the Surrealist Jindřich Štyrský.
But it was not until the 1940s that Josef Sudek established his unmistakable creative identity, when he began to photograph views from his studio window and various still-life arrangements, which he then used to produce positive contact prints from negatives of different sizes. His portraits, genre scenes, still lifes, and the Prague architecture and landscape compositions capturing changing light effects, are appreciated worldwide for their lyricism, romanticism, and transparent purity.
Sudek's extensive oeuvre includes a number of large-scale thematic series, to which he repeatedly returned over the years. Among them are Okno mého ateliéru [The Window of my Studio] (1940-1954), Zahrada mého ateliéru [The Garden of My Studio] (1950-1970) and Zátiší na okně mého ateliéru [Still Life at the Window of My Studio] (1950-1958). Josef Sudek is considered one of the leading representatives of the international photographic avant-garde, and his magical-nostalgic images remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration for younger generations of photographers.
In this exhibition, the romantic mood of Sudek's series is also evident in the photographic compositions by Václav Jirásek, who, after studying graphic arts and painting, was a member of the artist group Bratrstvo [Brotherhood]. He exhibited anonymously with the group between 1989 and 1993. Jakub Špaňhel finds Sudek's cycle from Prague's St Vitus Cathedral inspiring and "very intimate".
THE WINDOW OF MY STUDIO, 1940–1954
THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING IN PRAGUE, c.1960
VANISHED STATUES, 1961
EASTER MEMORIES, 1963–1970
b. 1896 in Kolín nad Labem, Kingdom of Bohemia
d. 1976 in Prague