Author Description

Josef Sudek (1896-1976) began his career in photography by submitting prints to international salons, competitions in which photographs were assessed by a jury, and the results published in a salon yearbook. From the start, Sudek's work met with great success at the salons, alongside that of Drtikol, Krupka and others, but it was only with the series From My Studio Window, which originated during World War II, that his name found wider fame. As a result, Sudek's salon photographs, dating from his return from World War I in 1918 until around 1932 (by which time he had begun his own business), have tended to be overlooked. The Unknown Josef Sudek retrieves these early works: beautiful still lifes, portraits, street scenes and interiors. Presenting the largest collection of this work to date, the publication reevaluates the importance of the photographer's earliest experiments, and demonstrates how he used the salons as a testing ground for new ideas.