by Charles Sawyer
[Originally published in Creative Camera,
April 1980, Number 190]
Go straight to photos of Sudek by the author
Prologue.
Josef Sudek was born in 1896 in Kolin on
the Labe in Bohemia. As a boy he learned the trade of bookbinding. He
was drafted into the Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian
Front until he was wounded in the right arm. Infection set in and
eventually surgeons removed his arm at the shoulder. During his
convalescence in an Army Hospital, he began photographing his fellow
inmates. After his discharge, Sudek studied photography for two years in a
school for graphic art in Prague. Between a disability pension and
intermitment work as a commercial photographer, Sudek made a
living. In 1933, he held his first one-man show in the Krasnajizba
salon. Since 1947, he has published eight books. In the early 1950's,
Sudek acquired an 1894 Kodak Panorama camera whose spring-drive
sweeping lens makes a negative 10 cm x 30 cm. He employed this exotic
format to make a stunning series of cityscapes of Prague, published in
1959.
Sudek's work first appeared in America in 1974 when the George
Eastman House in Rochester, New York, gave him a retrospective
exhibition. The same year Light Gallery in New York City showed an
exhibition of his photographs. On his 80th birthday in April, 1976,
the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague inaugurated a comprehensive
retrospective exhibition of Sudek's work which later appeared at the
Photographer's Gallery, London.
In spite of his disability, Sudek
always used large format cameras and from the 1940's on he made only
contact prints. He worked without assistants in the open air in city
and countryside. His hunched figure supporting a huge wooden tripod
was a familiar sight in Prague. Although he never married and was
rather shy, he was not a recluse and was renowned for his weekly
soirees for listening to classical music from his vast record
collection. Sudek died quietly and without suffering or illness in
mid-September 1976 in Prague.
Sudek, The Man And His Work.
Josef Sudek was born in 1896 in the industrial town of Kolin on the
River Labe in Bohemia. Czechoslavakia then existed only in the
imagination of a few visionary artists, particularly writers, and of
some political activists. Emperor Franz Josef reigned on the Hapsburg
throne and Bohemia was a Kingdom in the Austro- Hungarian
Empire. Josef's father was a house painter and he apprenticed his son
to a bookbinder; a fellow worker introduced the young man to
photography. In 1915 he was drafted and assigned to a unit on the
Italian front. After slightly less than a year in the line, he was
wounded in the right arm. The wound was not serious, but gangrene set
in; a long struggle ensued and f inally Sudek's arm was removed at the
shoulder. For three years, he was a patient in a veteran's hospital;
it was there, during his recuperation, that he first began
photographing in earnest.
The years from his leaving the veteran's
hospital around 1920 until 1926 were restless years for Sudek. He
could not take up his trade of bookbinding. He was offered an office
job but turned it down. After settling in Prague, he cast about for a
new lot. He considered taking up the life of a small merchant but had
no taste for it. To keep body and soul together, he took photographs
for small commissions. He joined the Amateur Photography Club and
struck up a friendship with Jaromir Funke, a well-educated, vocal,
young photographer with advanced aesthetic theories concerning
photography. In 1922, Sudek enrolled in the School of Graphic Arts in
Prague and received an old-school, formal education in
photography. Two main subjects occupied his attention with his camera:
his former fellow-patients, the invalids in the veteran's hospital,
and the reconstruction of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague then in
progress. Occasionally he returned to his native Kolin to photograph
the leisure life in the parks of the city. Still, he was unsettled,
apparently not yet reconciled to his loss. And he was contentious.
Together with his friend Funke, he was expelled from the Photography
Club for his impatient opposition to those who stood firmly by the
then entrenched techniques of painterly affectations. The two upstarts
gathered other like-minded photographers and formed the avant-garde
Czech Photographic Society in 1924, devoted to the integrity ot the
negative and freedom from the painters' tradition. Although Funke was
the same age as Sudek, he had already studied law, medicine and
philosophy. Sudek admired his superior education and intellectual
capacities, and their discussions often led to ambitious projects.
In 1926, Sudek suffered a life crisis brought on when he accepted an
invitation from his friends in the Czech Philharmonic to join them on
tour initaly.His description of the odyssey is reproduced by Bullaty
(page 27). It runs as follows:
The interpretation of Sudek's life offered in the previous paragraph
seems to me reflected in his photography and borne out in his life
style. His photos from 1920 until the year of his crisis are markedly
different, both in style and content, from those following. In the
series from the veteran's hospital taken in the early 1920's, his
former fellow-invalids are seen as ghostly silhouettes shrouded in
clouds of light - lost souls suspended in Limbo. In the photos of
Sunday pleasure-seekers in his native Kolin from the same period, the
people are seen from 6 distance, through soft focus, in social
clusters, usually with their backs to the camera, suggesting the
closure of the ordinary social world to outsiders. His extended study
of the reconstruction of St. Vitus begun in 1924, two years before his
crisis, and completed in 1928, with the publication of his first book,
can all too easily be taken as a metaphor for his personal struggle to
reconstruct his own life.
After 1926, Sudek began to find his own personal style and come into
his full powers as an artist. Gone is the haze of soft focus, and
gone too, are the people - even most of his cityscapes show deserted
streets. He turned his attention to the city of Prague with devotion
and dedication that are rare even among the most committed artists.
He succeeded to capture both the grandeur and the unpretentiousness of
that lovely city. Yet, lovely as it still looks, through his lens it
is empty. As if to compensate for the absence of the human factor in
its customary place, Sudek personified the inanimate. The woods of
Bohemia and Moravia projected on his view-screen were inhabitated by
"sleeping giants", as he called them, huge dead trees that watched
over the landscape like statues out of Easter Island. In his playful
moods, Sudek toyed with masks and statuary heads, showing them as
lovers, as grotesqueries, or even as gods. He found intimacy hard to
achieve - perhaps because it was painful - not just in his
interpersonal life but even under his viewing cloth. Its substitute
came easily with inanimate objects. "I love the life of objects," he
told one interviewer. "When the children go to bed, the objects come
to life. I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects."
He devoted endless hours to photographing special objects in various
settings, particularly objects given to him by friends. He often
called these photos "remembrances" of this or that person. It appears
as if his personal rapport with the inanimate things he photographed
so lovingly began as an alternative to real intimacy with other
persons and evolved into a means to bridge the gap that stood between
him and the others.
As he came to his artistic maturity, immersion in work and devotion to
a high standard of craftsmanship became the dominant motifs of Sudek's
life. In 1940, he saw a 30 x 40 cm photograph of a statue from
Chartres, which, he recognized, was not an enlargement but one made by
the contact process. The print so impressed him for its rendering of
the stone material that he vowed thereafter always to make contact
prints. He said it was less the fineness of details he craved in
contact prints, than their tonal variation. From then on he lugged
view cameras as large as the 30 x 40 cm format (roughly 12 x 16
inches) around the steep streets of the Hradcany and Mala Strana
sections of Prague, working with one hand, cradling the camera in his
lap to make adjustments, using his teeth when his hand was
insufficient.
No photographer, save possibly Atget, was so devoted to the task of
portraying a city, and with such stunning results, as Sudek. He
couldn't have had a better subject than Prague; not even Atget was so
lucky with Paris. Prague is, to many, the jewel of Europe. In the
days when Europe from Paris to St. Petersburg was still one cultural
continuum, Prague was considered the heart of the continent. The city
was Mozart's second home after Vienna (the Czechs seemed to him to
have appreciated him more than his fellow Viennese), and it also was
Kafka's native city. Somehow the two blend, as do the massive
buildings of the city of Gothic, Rennaissance, and Baroque
architecture. (The modern buildings, especially housing estates, are
mercifully placed on the outskirts of the city). Two features dominate
the city: Charles Bridge, the footbridge spanning the Vltava, lined
with statues depicting the history of Christianity and the Czechs, and
Hradcany Castle, a sprawling fortress enclosing several courtyards,
the traditional residence of Czech kings, as well as St. Vitus
Cathedral. Charles Bridge dates from the 14th century and Hradcany's
earliest construction dates from the 12th century. The castle, which
is on the crest of a steep ridge rising from the west bank of the
Vltava, dominates the profile of the city seen from the east bank of
the river. In all, Sudek compiled seven books of Prague photographs.
He left the streets only toward the very end, when old age added to
his handicap and made moving around the city with his camera a titanic
struggle. In the Prologue to her book (p. 14), Sonja Bultaty tells an
anecdote about helping Sudek photograph Prague. It portrays the
special relationship between him and the city.
His workman-like attitude applied not only to the purely technical
side of things but to the aesthetics of his camera work as
well. Nowhere does this show so clearly as in his panoramic
photos. The unusual format with its extreme proportions of 1 x 3 and
the special distortions caused by the sweeping lens are extremely
demanding, like the constraints of a sonnet. Yet like any set of
artistic constraints, the peculiar requirements of the panoramic photo
offer opportunities not found elsewhere. Sudek never tired of
exploring the possibilities of the photographic sonnets he could make
with his antique mechanism whose shutter speeds were marked simply
"fast" and "slow". With it he gave us a geodesic feeling for the
country-side which far surpasses anything we get from isolated views,
and in Prague itself he showed how the River Vltava is an integral
part of the city and how the labyrinthian quality of the city is
offset by its broad open spaces. He was never short of resourceful
ways of using the panoramic format. Before the horizontal panorama
had yieided all its secrets, Sudek turned the camera on its side and
gave us vertical panoramas!
The systematic approach, and the dogged aesthetic experimentation of
Sudek are akin to the working habits of Cezanne. But these alone are
insufficient to make great art or even good art. On the contrary, if
these are all one sees in a work, then the cumulative burdern of so
much plain labor would be unbearable. Sudek's devotion to work may
have integrated his shattered life but it could not have offered him
the spiritual redemption he was seeking; only his aesthetic quest
could bring this. It is the struggle for spiritual redemption through
his aesthectic quest that gives Sudek's best photographs their true
power. Two qualities characterize his best work: a rich diversity of
light values in the low end of the tonal scale, and the representation
of light as a substance occupying its own space. The former, the
diversity of light values, requires very delicate treatment of the
materials, especially the negative, but also the paper (Sudek used
silver halide papers in the main). The latter, the portrayal of light
as substance, is a more original trait then his tonal palette, which
one sees in occasional prints of other photographers. Flaubert once
expressed an ambition to write a book which would have no subject, "a
book dependent on nothing external ... held together by the strength
of its style." Photographers have sometimes expressed parallel
aspirations to make light itself the subject of their photographs,
leaving the banal, material world behind. Both ideals are, of course,
unobtainable, but nonetheless they may be worth pursuing. (Artists,
in their pursuit of the unobtainable, are not so likely to be called
pathological as others,of us, though recent developments in ihe
philosophy of science tend to view the scientist's quest for truth as
equally quixotic). Sudek has come closer than any other photographer
to catching this illusive goal. His devices for this effect are simple
and highly poetic: the dust he raised in a frenzy when the light was
just right, a gossamer curtain draped over a chair back, the mist from
a garden sprinkler, even the ambient moisture in the atmosphere when
the air is near dew point. The eye is usually accustomed to seeing not
light but the surfaces it defines; when light is reflected from
amorphous materials, however, perception of materiality shifts to
light itself. Sudek looked for such materials everywhere. And then he
usually balanced the ethereal luminescence with the contra-bass of his
deep shadow tonalities. The effect is enchanting, and strongly
conveys the human element which is the true content of his
photographs. For, throughout all his photography, there is one
dominant mood, one consistent viewpoint, and one overriding
philosophy. The mood is melancholy and the point of view is
romanticism. And overriding all this is a philosphic detachment, an
attitude he shares with Spinoza. The attitude of detachment that
characterizes Sudek's art accounts for both its strength and weakness:
the strength which lies in the ideal of utter tranquility and the
weakness which is found in the paucity of human intimacy, Some
commentators find Sudek's photos mysterious but I think this is a
mistake: the air of mystery vanishes once we see in Sudek's
photography a person's private salvation from despair.
All photos of Josef Sudek were taken by Charles Sawyer.
Click
the images to see them enlarged.
"When the musicians ot the Czech Philharmonic told me: 'Josef come
with us, we are going to Italy to play music,' I told myself, 'fool
that you are, you were there and you did not enjoy that beautiful
country when you served as a soldier for the Emperor's Army.' And so
went with them on this unusual excursion. In Milan, we had a lot of
applause and acclaim and we travelled down the Italian boot untill we
came to that place -- I had to disappear in the middle of the concert;
in the dark I got lost, but I had to search. Far outside the city
toward dawn, in the fields bathed by the morning dew, finally I found
the place. But my arm wasn't there - only the poor peasant farmhouse
was still standing in its place. They had bought me into it that day
when I was shot in the right arm. They could never put it together
again, and for years I was going from hospital to hospital, and had to
give up my bookbinding trade. The Philharmonic people apparently even
made the police look for me but I somehow could not get myself to
return from this country. I turned up in Prague some two months
later. They didn't reproach me, but from that time on, I never went
anywhere, anymore and I never will. What would I be looking for when
I didn't find what I wanted to find?"
From Sudek's sketchy account of his crisis in 1926, we get a picture
of a restless and troubled man accepting a casual invitation that
leads him near the very spot where years before his hope for a normal
life had been shattered. Leaving his friends, in mid-concert he
wanders somnabulent until near dawn he comes to the exact place where,
nearly ten years before, his life was forever changed. Unable to
abandon hope of recovering his lost arm, he stays two months in that
place, cut off from his friends and his world in Prague. Finally, his
mourning complete, reconciled, but permanently estranged, he returns
to Prague, where he immerses himself in his art.
I remember one time, in one of the Romanesque halls, deep below the
spires of the cathedral [St. Vitus] - it was dark as in catacombs
- with just a small window below street level inside the massive
medieval walls. We setup the tripod and camera and then sat down
on the floor and talked. Suddenly Sudek was up like lightening. A
ray of sun had entered the darkness and both of us were waving
cloths to raise mountains of dust 'to see the light,' as Sudek
said. Obviously he had known that the sun would reach here
perhaps two or three times a year and he was waiting for it.
Copyright Charles Sawyer, 2000. Images and text may not be reproduced
without permission from Charles
Sawyer.