Work:
He trained originally as a bookbinder. He started taking amateur photographs from 1913. He was wounded at the Italian front in 1917 and had to have his right arm amputated. He began taking photographs intensively and in 1922 he studied at the State Graphic School in Prague. In 1924 he bacame the founder of the Czech Photographic Society. In 1950 he explored photographing with a panoramic camera. He was interested in depicted light and shade. His work presents a desire to use photograph to preserve fleeting moments that only exist for a split second. His work creates an extremely claustrophobic space with the use of dark tonalities featuring in his representations of rooms and wider spaces. His skill was creating atmospheric images, spaces filled with emotion and intense reflection (perhaps conveying the political climate in which he worked).
"I made the potency of light clear to myself through still lifes. Still lifes were my laboratory. Photographers should do still lifes. There the photographer has free will. He places thigns wherever he wants to, puts them as he likes, does it with any kind of light. I don't know what other subject would give such freedom." Josef Sudek (Slovnik Misto Pameti)
Sudek was largely unknown outside of Prague until his panoramic photographs were published in 1959.