Jan Saudek stages his nude photographs as a chorus of intoxicating costumes and straightforward nakedness; however, it is often not the unclothed models that the photographer exposes, but those supposedly clothed, whose insides he reveals to the viewer through skillful composition.
(...) Continue readingJan Saudek found his way to photography through detention and torture
Jan Saudek was born in Prague on 13 May 1935. His parents lived in a so-called ‘intermarriage’ and so the family were subjected to severe persecution – his father Gustav, a Jewish banker, was deported in 1945 to the concentration camp ‘Ghetto Theresienstadt’ together with six sons. The father survived, but the sons were murdered. According to Saudek’s own account, he and his twin brother Karel were imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele carried out experiments on them. Jan Saudek escaped the torments and horrors of this period by fleeing into debauched erotic fantasies, which he would later use as the basis of his photographic art. After the war, US soldiers gave him chocolate wrapped in pages from American comics, and Saudek used these comics to learn the English language. He started taking photographs at the age of fifteen, and his first camera was a Kodak Baby Brownie. In 1952 he completed an apprenticeship as photographer, and in 1959 received a more technically advanced camera from his young wife Marie, a FLEXARET 6X6, one which he still uses today.
Profoundly impressed by Edward Steichen; first successes in the West
One key experience for Jan Saudek was his encounter with the artistic work of Edward Steichen, whose monumental photo/text installation The Family of Man finally consolidated his resolve to be a photographer. His first chance to exhibit his photographs was in Prague in 1963, and in 1969 he made the jump to the USA where he was sponsored by the curator of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hugh Edwards. However, the communist regime in former Czechoslovakia was suspicious of his success in the West and placed him under surveillance. In 1983, his first English language illustrated book was published. At that time, Jan Saudek was already considered the greatest photographer in the Czech Republic, which encouraged many of his compatriots to follow in his footsteps. In 1987, his negative archive was temporarily confiscated by the police, but returned in full later.
Photo art as narrative compound
The numerous, mostly female nudes photographed in black and white and with later colouring are characteristic for the work of Jan Saudek. He employs sophisticated staging and opulent costumes and creates artificial, sometimes obscene-looking works which show the female body with all its flaws, wrinkles and imperfections. In his series of pictures, he plays with contrasts and developments, sometimes portraying women from young girlhood to old age, always in front of the same background and in a similar pose. Occasionally he mirrors his pictures like playing cards so that the viewer no longer knows which is the top and which is the bottom in the picture. His twin brother Karel was also very successful as a comic artist and illustrator, and under the pseudonym Kája Saudek, was considered the ‘King of Czech comics’. He died in 2015.
Alongside photography Jan Saudek also paints; he lives and works today primarily in his native town of Prague.
Jan Saudek - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
