Anna Fárová Books

Published on the occasion of the legendary Czech photographer's eightieth birthday, Josef Returning offers a comprehensive look at Koudelka's life and work, featuring all of the series for which he has become so well known, among them Beginnings , Experiments , Theatre , Gypsies , Invasion 68 , Exiles and Panorama . Besides Koudelka's photographs, many of which have become canonical works of postwar photography, the book is notable for its inclusion of unique archival material, such as excerpts from his diaries, contact prints, examples of book or magazine mockups from 1969 in preparation for the Invasion 68 series, and photographs of friends, as well as other images from his personal life. The book was conceived and edited by Koudelka himself, making this volume an exceptional publication.

Dubbed the "poet of Prague," Josef Sudek (1896-1976) was one of the most important and celebrated of Czech photographers. Sudek produced his best work during his middle-aged years, having grown up and out of the rules of modernism and into a style of his own. Whereas his photographs from the 1930s are mainly a reflection of the external world, by the 1940s he was returning to himself, finding his own unique creative path. It was during this period that he made his most famous photograph, a view of the world seen through his studio window, the window ledge doubling as a stage for still-life objects--a setup which he repeated to great effect. Not even the pressures of World War II and the difficult postwar years--including the demands of socialist realism in the arts--interrupted the continuity of his oeuvre, documented in this back-in-print volume.