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23 Josef Sudek was born in Kolín, Bohemia, on 17 March 1896. His father was a house painter, who died when Sudek was three. In 1915, he left to serve in the First World War as a soldier for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Having fought on the Italian front for a year, he suffered serious injuries, resulting in the loss of his right arm. He spent the following three years in various hospitals, and began to take photographs out of boredom. In 1922, Sudek enrolled at the School of Graphic Arts in Prague, where he studied for two years. In 1924, he founded the Czech Photographic Society, with photographer friends he had met at school, such as Jaromir Funke. He photographed the restoration of St Vitus Cathedral in Prague, which earned him a reputation as the official photographer for the city. From 1927, he worked for a number of magazines, co-publishing and illustrating both Panorama and Zijeme. Despite having only one arm, Sudek used very heavy and cumbersome equipment. His love for still life compositions and detailed landscapes meant that he needed the image quality that large-format cameras offered. Despite the movement from Pictorialism to Modernism throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Sudek stayed true to his original vision. He preferred to shoot dream-like scenes, with soft light, diffused through a foggy window or an overcast day. He was drawn to desolate, gloomy landscapes, simple, solitary objects and the quiet, unpopulated street scenes of Prague – a city to which he dedicated his whole life. In 1949, Sudek started experimenting with a Kodak panoramic camera, capturing Prague and the surrounding landscapes. The camera would produce 3 1/2 x 12 inch negatives and would capture an angle of 142 degrees. Over a ten-year period, he produced 284 of these panoramic landscape photographs, eventually publishing them in a book called Praha Panoramaticka. In 1974, Sudek had a large exhibition at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. He died two years later in Prague, on 15 September 1976, when he was 80 years old. Later, larger retrospectives were mounted in his honour in both Prague and Brno, in the Czech Republic. Josef Sudek 1896-1976 09 Josef Sudek, Rose in Glass, c. 1950 Silver gelatin print, printed c. 1950 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches Provenance: Barry Friedman Ltd, New York, 1998 Sudek's career straddled many of the major developments which led to photography being considered an artform. In the 1920s he embraced Pictorialism, the major movement that sought to raise photography's artistic credentials by focusing on the medium's poetic potential, and that embraced artificial techniques to heighten emotional response. Sudek returned to Pictorialism in the 1940s, after a period of more concentrated Modernism. Rose in Glass is typical of this richly atmospheric later work that focuses on his studio in Prague. and its environs.