There are artists whose work can be exhibited over and over, in different versions, cross-sections and groupings, after subject matter or technique. And then there are those who one does not only tire of but whose further, unknown works we keep discovering.
Josef Sudek is one of them, and his oeuvre is both blessed and cursed in this respect. Famous photographs never cease to captivate, and to this day no-one has managed to publicize the entire body of Sudek's legacy. The exhibition and the book exemplify both. Some of the photographs have been presented before, others have not. On the whole, the project can be viewed as a journey across the Sudek continent. Josef Sudek rose to fame through his later work, following on from My Studio Window, a series that originated during the Second World War.1 Sudek's oeuvre before this series was largely represented at exhibitions by photographs of modern utility objects dating from the 1930's. The vintage prints upon which this show is centred are not being presented for the first time (the title should not be taken too literally), yet they have remained at the fringes of attention.2 They came to existence in Prague upon Sudek's return from the First World War minus his right arm, finding the light in veterans' hospitals, amateur photography clubs, at the State Graphic School (then the Central State Graphic Institute) and finally, after 1927, in the studio in which the photographer ran a business. The majority of them are prints that need to be seen in the flesh, for they mediate an extraordinary experience. They were intended for the eyes and judgement of experts, and were conceived as such. At the time, international salons were chiefly frequented by photographers cultivating the new art, people who vigilantly followed anything new in the discipline, finely tuned to the strengths and weaknesses of their contemporaries. With only few exceptions, the main collection consists exclusively of "salon" prints, and the hundreds of Sudek photographs preserved from the 1920's and 1930's could hardly sit comfortably alongside them. Most of his "run-of-the-mill" prints were contact positives from negatives. The artist never treated them to the privileges of making vintage enlargements of them, or any such enlargements have not survived.3 Vintage prints are always highly valued. However, it does not follow that Sudek's albums, contact positives and other photographs taken in the 1920's and 1930's are less interesting; they are simply different and require independent publications and shows. Salons were basically competitions: photographs were assessed by a jury and participants learnt how they or their contemporaries had scored, in how many of them, from yearbooks. It was an extreme case of the art trade with a points system, like a sport. It was no secret that Sudek was one of the more successful contestants, together with František Drtikol, Drahomír J. Růžička, Jan Lauschmann, Jaroslav Krupka, Alois Zych, Jaromír Funke, Adolf Schneeberger and others, yet he was viewed as one in many. Considering his unique late work, this still holds true. Nevertheless, some of Sudek's early photographs are of extraordinary importance and the whole is richly and distinctively structured; blind alleys intersect paths leading to the artist's future uniqueness. It appears highly probable that now the topical nature of Sudek's photographs from the Most region has demonstrated itself (in relation to ecological issues and, among others, photographers of the "New Topographics"), his earlier works are due for "new" appraisal. The process of updating and reinterpreting is, however, associated with a disquieting awareness that even thirty years after Sudek's death, we are not sufficiently familiar with his output, the work of a photography fanatic.
