Josef Sudek( 1896–1976) — A photographer’s obsession with light
For a good resource of Sudek’s work please use the following link: https://www.artnet.com/artists/josef-sudek
In the 1920s Sudek’s work was mostly pictorial. His desire to achieve mastery led him to study and be thoughtful on his images and the quality of the work presented, elevating photography to a level of fine art that had perhaps not been achieved before.
During this decade, the Czech artist followed a trend that tried to bring photography closer to paintings. Leveling on the impressionists and landscape painters before them, pictorialist photographers used techniques to impart a painterly quality to their photographs. These included the use of soft focus as seen in Sudek’s “Two women walking into a church”, low contrast and reduced sharpness . This approach was common in this period, gaining special relevance from the beginning of the century with Alfred Stieglitz in New York, the artist expecting to move away from the early days of photography being seen as a cheating way of capturing an image and not a fine art form.
Furthermore, it is important to recognize that until the years following World War I, machines had not yet permeated society entirely, and the modern world had not fully taken shape. Consequently, some critics view pictorialism as a rebellion against the mechanization of society, a rage against the machines. By focusing on landscape photography, artists sought to engage in a dialogue with the natural world, drawing parallels to traditional art forms and painters.
Sudek is an exemplary genius in this realm. Employing techniques that evoke the quality of light diffusing through the mist of early morning, as showcased in his work “Morning Tram” from 1924. Additionally, his deliberate incorporation of reflections in road bricks further bolsters the pictorial artistic perspective associated with Josef Sudek.
Another compelling illustration of Sudek’s fascination with light during this period is evident in the photographs captured during construction work at Prague’s Cathedral. Sudek recounts in an interview how he instructed his assistant to vigorously shake blankets, dispersing the dust from the construction into the air and forming a dense curtain that would be pierced by the diagonal rays of light streaming through the church window.
Photography was being used to explore new concepts and forms of expression. One must remember it wasn’t until the second part of the 1930’s that documentary photography was created. Driven by initiatives as the Farm and Security Administration, with artists as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans covering the poverty of rural US during the Great Depression or Robert Capa coverage of the Spanish civil war. This photographers wanted not only to inform us, but to move us. The softened images of the pictorialists could be aiming in the same direction.
Eventually, pictorialist groups fragmented. The excessive minutiae and concentration on the technique often reduced the possible scope, losing on the photographic vision; soft focus and reduced sharpness eventually led to an inspirational dead-end.
Starting after 1924, Sudek began to find his own personal style and come into his full powers as an artist. Together with his friend Jaromir Funke, he moved way from the Prague Photography Club in opposition to the pictorialist colleagues. The two upstarts gathered other like-minded photographers and formed the avant-garde Czech Photographic Society in 1924, devoted to the integrity of the negative and freedom from the painters’ tradition and the haze of soft edges.
Sudek turned its focus and romance to Prague. Narrow streets, charming parks, nightscapes and backlit statues in Charles Bridge were the subjects of his devotion and dedication to the grandeur of the city. This moved him forward to a larger, hard-edge modernist world, supported by an increase of contrast, use of the graphic shapes of the city and the geometric patterns of the night shadows.
Photos of the window-glass that led to his garden, The Window of My Atelier series from 1940 to 1954, is of fundamental importance to get to know Sudek and his reclusive behavior. Images captured from his studio window, experiencing on light refraction and blurred images caused by rain drops are his approach to a Surreal or Magic Realist style.
The year 1940 is of great importance for the artist. By then, immersion in work and devotion to photography had already brought the artist to a high standard of craftsmanship. He saw a a 30 x 40 cm photograph of a statue from Chartres, developed by contact process. He was so impressed with the rendering of the material and the tonal variations one could achieve that from then on he rarely enlarged his photos and work mainly with contact prints from large format cameras. Sudek was a know figure carrying the large camera with tripod around the steep streets of the Hradcany and Mala Strana sections of Prague. Working with one hand ( Sudek had lost his right arm in World War I while serving in Italy), holding the camera cradled in his lap to make adjustments, using his teeth when single hand work wasn’t enough.
With the Nazi occupation of Prague this were not the best times to go around taking photographs with a large camera. Maybe because of this, Sudek photos can be understood as moody representations of a city under occupation. Communism followed Fascism and during this times his studio was a kind of cultural oasis. Sudek was passionate about music and held weekly soirees for his friends. Because he had friends and contacts from the West that would send him contemporary records, his house was a place of sharing and appreciation of modern music.
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, whose contact prints were published in 1959.
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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.
