Jan Soudek – relentless ambition in photography

Jan Saudek is nowadays the most renowned Czech phoptographer in the world. He has had over 400 one-man shows held at. His photographs are included in the most important world collections.

Born in Prague in 1935, Saudek cultivated his dream to become a photographer since an adult. Self-taught, viscerally independent and hostage of the communist regime, he worked as a photographer for years in the cellar of his house (using the scraped off part of the room as his backdrop), vigorously achieving moral norms and social rules to follow his passion. And he mastered photography, which managed to free his delirium, his indignations: a mental grid, of the heart, of sex.

Through his black and white shots (which he began to colour by hand from ’77), a grotesque and intriguing eroticism of his nudes are coarsely shown both in its form and content. His images explore dreams more than reality, although strongly characterized by bloody subjects always expressed by the person drawn, and by the use of hand coloured images.
These images produce a non-realistic and honorific effect on oneself, even if Saudek’s choice was dictated by accidental difficulty of dangerous findings and coloured developments.

His photography has been a celebration of characteristics of human nature since the seventies: human beings, woman, father, mother, lovers and babies and adolescents. The passing of time, birth and death. In the eighties, a series of antithetical elements entered his imagination: love and hate, beauty and ugliness, youth and old age. They are all an animalistic aggression that as such stroked his masochism.

“Once there was a man who worked in a factory from six in the morning until three in the afternoon. He lived in a basement with the plaster crumbling off the mouldy walls, and all he could see through the window was a gloomy enclosed area. That man was Jan Saudek, and he owned little more than the bicycle he rode to the factory and an old Flexaret 6 x 6. His most valuable assets were certainly his immense energy and relentless ambition.â€

(Christiane Frickeová, on JAN SAUDEK)