Jan Saudek

Biography

Saudek once told a story about himself of six weeks in a concentration camp, but it later emerged that the brothers were never in one, and that the story was told for publicity. It was their father who was held at Theresienstadt; the length of his stay is given differently, as three months or as the time from February 1945. His mother and many relatives did not survive the war.

He was born on 13 May 1935 in Prague, the younger of twins: his older brother was Karel, later known as Kája Saudek, a comic-book artist. His father, Gustav, worked in a bank and came from a Jewish family; his mother was Czech. Jan began drawing after a graphic arts school. His first camera, a Kodak, came to him around 1950, and from 1952 he worked in a print shop. That job, as he himself put it, was imposed on him by the authorities and lasted until 1983.

In 1954–1956 he did his military service. From 1959 he used a medium-format Flexaret 6×6 camera, and also drew and painted. The decisive push came from the catalogue of Edward Steichen’s exhibition “The Family of Man”: it fell into Saudek’s hands in 1963, and from then on he took art photography seriously. In the same year his first exhibition was held at the Divadlo Na zábradlí theatre in Prague.

In 1969 he went to the United States and met Hugh Edwards, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. His first solo exhibition took place at Indiana University in Bloomington. Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Berkeley followed, and from 1974 Paris.

At home it was harder. He photographed in a cellar so as not to attract the attention of the secret police. In 1972, in his studio on Koněvova Street, there appeared the motif that became his signature: a peeling wall, which a model had advised him to use. Against it, and against painted backdrops, a clouded sky and a view of Charles Bridge, nude and semi-nude figures appeared. Many of the pictures are hand-coloured. To my mind, that is why they look less like photographs than like scenes from someone else’s dream. He photographed childhood, motherhood and fatherhood, man and woman, old age and youth.

In the West he was noticed at the end of the 1970s: in 1977 there were shows in Sydney and Melbourne, then in Arles, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, London and Cologne. In 1983 the first book about him in English appeared, and in the same year the authorities let him leave the print shop and apply for permission to work as an artist. He received a card from the Fund of Czechoslovak Artists and began to photograph freely. In 1987 the police seized the archive of his negatives; the negatives were later returned. Exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at the Centre Pompidou took place in the 1980s and early 1990s.

His exhibitions sometimes caused controversy. In the 1990s some Western countries tried to censor his erotic work, and in August 2011 the photograph “Black Sheep & White Crow”, showing a semi-naked girl, was removed from the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in Australia just before the opening, following objections.

In 1990 Saudek received the French Order of Arts and Letters, in 2006 the Artis Bohemiae Amicis award of the Czech Ministry of Culture, and in 2019 the Czech state’s Medal of Merit. His books were published by Taschen and Slovart, and his photographs became covers for albums by Soul Asylum, Daniel Lanois and other musicians. His work is held at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Moravian Gallery in Brno and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

In the 2000s he lost control of his negatives: the photographs were managed by the company Saudek.com, founded by his son. In 2012 the High Court in Prague declared the contracts invalid and returned control of the works to Saudek. He lives and works in Prague. His brother Kája died on 25 June 2015.