Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Devoted - Josef Sudek





Josef Sudek (17 March 1896, Kolín, Bohemia – 15 September 1976, Prague) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague. Sudek was originally a bookbinder.
 During the First World War, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm in 1916 which led to the limb being amputated at the shoulder. After the war, he studied photography for two years in Prague under Jaromir Funke. His army disability pension gave him leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic Pictorialist style. Always pushing at the boundaries, a local camera club expelled him for arguing about the need to move forward from ‘painterly’ photography. Sudek then founded the progressive Czech Photographic Society in 1924. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras with the aid of assistants. 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.
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