In a weird turn of events, despite the fact that my capstone project and degree had nothing to do with photography, it was Josef Sudek who featured prominently in my undergraduate thesis. There’s a faerie quality to his photographs—even when he is capturing only the slant of light or an egg in front of a window; the light skips and is alive; the egg is not really an egg; whole worlds are revealed refracted through prisms and mirrors; there are stories being spun in gelatin silver.

Born in Bohemia in 1896, Sudek was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army during WWI. When he lost his right arm to gangrene caused by shrapnel—and thereby his expectation of a career as a bookbinder—he turned to photography. Still, the trauma of the war remained long after the war ended, and culminated for Sudek in his disappearance into the Italian countryside in 1926.

“When the musicians of 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?”

http://boothceramics.com/journal/josef-sudek-and-the-life-of-objects/

On returning to Prague, he took up his camera again and began capturing the post-war renovation of Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral. Death, loss, and absence filter through his images throughout his life. They pass his lens as surely and quietly as the dust motes he stirred hurriedly into the air before opening the shutter on his enormous box camera—his method of solidifying the shafts of light that would pour into the cathedral.

But as the cathedral was reborn so was he, and so was his photographic style. There is both sadness and hope in his images, sculpted out of light and its absence, deftly telling the stories of spaces and things with a mixture of melancholy, reverence and childlike wonder.

His relative geographic isolation after 1926 contrasts the depth with which he came to know and photograph increasingly tighter spaces and smaller subjects. The city, itself, in its fairytale glory; the immediate surroundings of his home; any number of lovingly, chaotically alive corners of his studio, littered with uncounted papers and objects; his studio window, draped in condensation; assorted objects in close-up, arranged with tenderness and reverence.

Sudek’s studio window became an object of abiding fascination—rather like the surface of a canvas—reflecting moments of exquisite tenderness and hope when a flowering branch brushed against its pane, or of poignant melancholy when he observed the world beyond his window transformed by the playful infinity of mist. His room with a view allowed him to capture, on film, his love of Prague. His photographs demonstrate both a precision and a depth of feeling, fitting odes to the rich history and architectural complexity of the Czech capital.

http://artresearchmap.com/exhibitions/the-intimate-world-of-jusef-sudek/

Eventually the space seemed to invert, as mirrors and glass, reflections and refractions became larger and larger parts of his compositions, opening the space back up again into mysterious worlds as “the Poet of Prague” approached the end of his life.

It is during one of the later series (his “Labyrinths”) that he produces my favorite of his photographs. There aren’t any glorious beams of light, no refracting glass, no misty windows, secret gardens, or individual totems. It is an image of a desk, stuffed full—every nook and cranny—with papers, books, photos and assorted paraphernalia. God knows how long some of those things had been left there untouched, but his attention to objects makes me think he knew what each one of those fragments was, its history, and had some idea of what it meant to him. It is as if it is an image of his own self, pulled inside out (inverted as the space in his photographs will come to be), the collected loves and knowledge of a solitary soul, familiar with the subtlest qualities of things, his own mind cataloged outside his body.

There is a kinship between Sudek and Tolkien in my brain. Sudek never married and never had children, he fought for the “other side” in the war, and it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that his work even began to attract much attention on the international stage. Yet their lifespans were nearly concurrent; both were sensitive men, permently altered by early tragedy and the horrors of The Great War, and both seemed to cope with this tragedy through imagination and story, clinging to that which was magical in the mundane, in awe of beauty both high and low.

Notes

• More about Sudek at the following link: http://www.tresbohemes.com/2015/08/photo-lens-josef-sudek-the-poet-of-prague/
• A 2016 Paris exhibition produced this video overview of his work: https://vimeo.com/172740714