A Trainee, Assistants and Some Followers of Josef Sudek
Whenever Czech photographers are asked what artists, exhibitions or books have influenced their personal lives and professional careers, many of them mention the name of Josef Sudek. Sudek’s star rose as early as the 1920s and already a decade later he was acknowledged as one of the foremost avant-garde photographers and specialists in industrial and advertising photography. His change in style and content at the outset of World War II, shift towards subjectivism and his photographic series The Window of My Studio were motivated and complemented by a radical transformation of his life philosophy. Among other things, this included his focus on young people who were to accompany him for many decades thereafter.
In the 1940s, students and emerging artists of various disciplines took refuge in Sudek’s photographic studio located in a shabby courtyard of a building on Prague‘s Újezd Street; not only those who hid out from the war there (the only real studio apprentice Jaroslav Kysela, and graphic artists Václav Sivko and Vladimír Fuka) but also musicians, theater experts and their friends. Rather than escapism, the Tuesday musical evenings of listening to the phonograph were adventurous expeditions into the world of classical music – a free zone that remained unaffected by the dire reality even during the country’s military occupation and the difficult postwar years. After the war, the childless Sudek and his sister Božena took in the young Sonja Bullaty, a Jewish girl who had returned from a concentration camp and who later on (after marrying in the United States) became Sudek’s “vanguard” in that overseas country. Throughout his life, Sudek addressed her uč-muč (abbreviated from the Czech words učedník-mučedník, meaning “martyr apprentice”) – a unique, humorous acronym that Sonja was rightly proud of all her life. In the fifties, Sudek was alternately in the company of two young men whom he simply called asáci (short for asistenti, assistants). A native of Kolín like Sudek, Jiří Toman, a photographer and experimentor, was one of the assistants who used Sudek’s panoramic camera in a distinctive way. The other was Jan Rothmayer, the son of Otto Rothmayer, Prague Castle’s chief architect. Under the influence of his teacher, Jan Rothmayer briefly used a large-format camera, making positives – like his mentor – employing the contact print technique. Both men helped Sudek realize one of the greatest book projects in Czech photography – the legendary Praha panoramatická (Prague Panoramic) published in 1959. While the emerging photographer Jan Svoboda also observed Josef Sudek’s work from a distance, the physician Petr Helbich was to become Sudek’s close assistant. Helbich acquainted Sudek with the Mionší virgin forest and was his support (not only medically) throughout the following years.
In the 1960s and during the first half of the seventies, at the time of the belated, yet well deserved interest in Josef Sudek’s oeuvre from both Czech and foreign admirers, Jan Strimpl also became Sudek’ assistant. Strimpl was chiefly instrumental in helping Sudek prepare several retrospective exhibitions of seminal importance that recapitulated the photographer’s lifelong creative pursuits. Held in 1976, these were Josef Sudek: A Comprehensive Exhibition of His Photographic Work shown at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Photographer Josef Sudek hosted at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and Josef Sudek, a display presented in Aachen, Germany. Josef Sudek devoted several years to preparing these exhibitions, going through a major part of his archive, finding and classifying the preserved period positives and making several hundred author contact prints and enlargements from old negatives (namely images dating from the 1920s). It was specifically in this extremely tedious work that his young assistant Jan Strimpl (already a highly skilled technician by then) lent him a helping hand. Josef Sudek died in the fall of 1976; the preparation of that many events was Sudek’s last heroic achievement in his accomplished life.
In the seventies, many artists, including young students of the Prague FAMU Film School (among them Jaroslav Anděl, a photography theoretician and photographer), voiced their adherence to Sudek’s oeuvre, many of them succumbing to the magic of large-format cameras and contact prints. Some of his followers (and there are quite a few to this day) have distinguished themselves as programmatic traditionalists who give precedence to the more than century-old methods and techniques. These include Jan Reich, a highly acclaimed landscape photographer, as well as Karel Kuklík, Bohumír Prokůpek and others. Many photographers have sought elsewhere and otherwise. Back in the sixties, Svoboda had won recognition for his admittedly Sudek-esque landscape variations that resulted in minimalist compositions. For his part, Petr Helbich discovered his theme in the Na Bulovce hospital, while Tono Stano, who had been given one of Sudek’s plate cameras, experimented with direct photography without negatives (his series White Shadows).
Like many others, Jan Strimpl, Josef Sudek’s assistant, was also captivated by this technique. Lately, he has been seeking solutions in his technically brilliant colour compositions that echo (in their titles, too) Josef Sudek’s photographic cycles Glass Labyrinths and Easter Remembrances; in other words, that part of Sudek’s mature work in the creation of which Jan Strimpl was personally present. However, this entirely unique personal experience is but a point of departure for Strimpl who has embraced new themes and compositions, in which he lets light and frequently also color impress the viewer with a strong visual impact. Some of his pictures feature glass objects, while other of his photographic images are divided into irregular strips reminiscent of the graphic art created by Jiří Kolář. Strimpl captures motifs from nature in great detail or against the empty stretches of sandy shores. Last but not least, once again he deals with the window theme, rendered now in brightly-colored compositions. It is beyond doubt that Strimpl found his acquaintance with Josef Sudek so fascinating that it still bears fruit nearly half a century later.
Jan Mlčoch
Curator, Department of Photography
Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague