Josef Sudek
Illustration — Josef Sudek in 1958 Josef Sudek (17 March 1896 – 15 September 1976) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague.
Josef Sudek

Miloň Novotný · Alena Novotná · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Born
- 1896 · Kolín.
- Died
- 1976 · Prague.
- Nationality
- Czechoslovakia
- Occupation
- photographer · collector
- Honours
- Order of Labour (Czechoslovakia)
- Languages
- Czech
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Documentary summary
Illustration — Josef Sudek in 1958 Josef Sudek (17 March 1896 – 15 September 1976) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague.
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Note VALÉORINE
Josef Sudek (1896–1976) was a collector and photographer, of Czechoslovak nationality. The collector was born in Kolín and died in Prague.
Languages used include Czech. Works are held at Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Art and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, among others. Honours include Order of Labour (Czechoslovakia).
Composed from admitted, traceable facts · 27 September 2026
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wikidata · Q1356243 · wikipedia · Josef Sudek
In this article
Life
Life
The recorded working language is Czech. Work by Josef Sudek is recorded in the collections of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Tate. Distinctions recorded are Order of Labour (Czechoslovakia).
• Illustration — Josef Sudek birth record 1896 Sudek was born in Kolín, Bohemia. Before the first world war he trained as a bookbinder and was an amateur photographer. 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 took up photography more seriously, and befriended Jaromír Funke and Adolf Schneeberger. He studied photography for two years in Prague under Karel Novák from 1922 to 1924. Together, Schneeberger, Funke, and Sudek founded the Czech Photographic Society (1924-1936). His army disability pension and some inheritance 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 forwards from 'painterly' photography. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras, sometimes with the aid of an assistant. 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, including contributions to the illustrated Prague weekly Pestrý týden and thus worked "in the style of the times". Primarily, his personal photography is neo-romantic. • Illustration — Sudek's restored atelier in Prague – Újezd His first commercial and critical success in publishing was the 1928 book on St. Vitus Cathedral, a book of photographs of the cathedral made during the final years of its construction. During and after World War II Sudek created haunting night-scapes and panoramas of Prague, photographed the wooded landscape of Bohemia, and the window-glass that led to his garden (the famous The Window of My Atelier series). He went on to photograph the crowded interior of his studio (the Labyrinths series). His work was first exhibited in the United States in Five Photographers at the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska/Lincoln in 1968. The George Eastman House presented Josef Sudek, A Retrospective Exhibition in 1974. He published 16 books during his life. Known as the "Poet of Prague", Sudek never married, and was a shy, retiring person. He never appeared at his exhibit openings and few people appear in his photographs. Despite the privations of the war and Communism, he kept a renowned record collection of classical music. In recent years, his work has frequently been reproduced in books, making his work some of the most readily accessible to those interested in twentieth-century Czech photography. In 1984 Sudek was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.
Select monographs
Select monographs
• Fotografie. Prague: Státní Nakladatelství Krásné Literatury, Hudby a Uméní, 1956. • Praha Panoramatická [Prague Panoramic]. Prague: Státní Nakladatelství Krásné Literatury, Hudby a Uméní, 1959. 284 panoramic photographs of Prague and environs with an introductory poem by Jaroslav Seifert. • Karlův Most: Ve Fotografii [The Charles Bridge in Photographs]. Prague: Státní Nakladatelství, 1961. 160 photographs of Charles Bridge, with an introduction by art historian Emanuel Poche and two introductory poems by Jaroslav Seifert. • Janacek-Hukvaldy, Praha: Supraphon, 1971 Photographs of Hukvaldy, birthplace of Czech composer Leoš Janáček. • Smutna Krajina: Severozapadni Cechy 1957-1962 [Sad Landscape: Northwest Bohemia 1957-1962], Gallery of Fine Art, Litomerice, 1999.

Miloň Novotný, Josef Sudek v ateliéru, Praha 1972
Miloň Novotný · Alena Novotná

Miloň Novotný, Portrét Josefa Sudka, Praha 1958
Miloň Novotný · Alena Novotná
Life and career
Dated record
Life and career
The full dated record · 2 entries
1896
Josef Sudek born at Kolín.
1976
Josef Sudek died at Prague.
Places
Named by the record
Places
Only places the record itself states, plotted where the house gazetteer settles their coordinates. Nothing is inferred from a name or a nationality.
Kolín.
Birth place
Prague.
Death place
Primary material
Documents and archives
reference work
- Wikidata, structured authority record Q1356243: Josef Sudek
Reputable secondary · Wikimedia Foundation
- “Josef Sudek”, English Wikipedia, consulted as further reading
Reputable secondary · Wikipedia
scholarly publication
- Josef Sudek, poet of Prague: a photographer's life, Choice Reviews Online, 1990
Scholarly · Crossref registry · 1990
Sudek in literature
In addition to conventional biographies of Sudek, John Banville's Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City introduces the reader to the city through the photographic lens of Joseph Sudek. Banville relates how he became enlisted to smuggle Sudek's photographs to the United States and through his tale and the story of Sudek muses on the history of Prague in its gravity and melancholy, torn by war and oppression. He re-creates the anxiety that must have faced the photographer in a city where, under Nazi occupation, landscape photography could be a mortal offense. Sudek was used as a symbolic presence in Howard Norman's novel Devotion. The protagonist, David Kozol, was a photographer and mentored under Sudek. David Kozol remarks on the melancholy that pervaded Sudek's work and a similar mood persists through the novel. Sudek figures symbolically in the novel; David Kozol's mother in law worked as a book binder and it was through apprenticeship to a book binder that Sudek became interested in photography. The characters seem to be symbolically injured or emotionally broken like the one armed Sudek and visual imagery figures prominently. In 2006 the Dutch poet Hans Tentije published a bundle containing the poem: "Met Josef Sudek op weg door Praag", "On my way through Prague with Sudek". In nine parts the poet "helps" Sudek with his photography.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Fárová, Anna. Josef Sudek. Kehayoff. 1999. 978-3-929078-55-8.
- 2.Dufek, AntonÍn. Jaromír Funke and Czech Photography, 1920–39. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949. An Online Project of The Museum of Modern Art. 2014.
- 3.UMĚNÍ ART 5. sudekproject.cz.
- 4.Josef Sudek. International Photography Hall of Fame.
- 5.Banville, John. Prague Pictures. Bloomsbury. 2003. 0-7475-6408-6.
- 6.Norman, Howard. Devotion. Houghton Mifflin. 2007. 9780618735419.
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
scholarly publication
Verifiedreference work
Wikidata, structured authority record Q1356243: Josef SudekWikimedia Foundation
Partially resolvedreference work
Partially resolved
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 14 August 2026.
Elsewhere in Photography
11,392 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
- Josef LöwyPhotographer
- Josef Maria EderPhotographer
- Josef RakoncajPhotographer
- Josef ŠroubekPhotographer
- Josef Václav SládekPhotographer
- Josef VětrovskýPhotographer
- Josef VosolsoběPhotographer
- Josef ŽáčekPhotographer
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