Jan Saudek

Jan Saudek is the most famous living Czech photographer, and simultaneously the most provocative. He is worshipped and condemned, celebrated and rejected, honored and execrated. He absorbs a viewer with a combination of tenderness and violence, traditionalism and extravagance, lyricism and irony, romance and obscenity. For over four decades Saudek has created a parallel photographic universe, a two-dimensional home full of longing, peopled with the most extraordinary characters and colored by desire. The timeless strength of his hand-tinted photographs lies in their poetic compositions and their forceful pictorial language, with its overtones of medieval genre pictures and Baroque mythology. Rejecting the traditional beauty in his famous nude photographs, Saudek shows the distinctively different: old women, fat women, children; real people in tableaux vivants that remind us of everything from surreal early movies to fin-de-siecle carnival nights. They exist outside time, a uniquely colored and almost mythical theater of dreams. Covering his debut in the 1950s through his lesser-known work to recent images, this dazzling collection offers us the true "velvet revolution," fertile and unsettling images from the dreams we might still have. Jan Saudek is, without question, the most provocative figure in the history of Czech photography. • Saudek´s photographs have made him internationally famous and he has become the best-known living Czech photographer. • This exceptional book shows his pictures touching on the most delicate and controversal aspects of human existence, but they are in their totality a celebration of mankind. • A unique insight into over 4 decades of life and work of the most provocative figure in the history of Czech photography. • The monograph is published in English, Czech and Russian language.