JAN SAUDEK PHOTOGRAPHS, 1987-1997

ISBN: 9783822879160
Edición trilingüe Inglés / Castellano / FrancésOne of the best-known czech photographers of the nudeI still dream of the day when I will take a photograph so beautiful that it can be called love, says Jan Saudek. He photographs young girls in the prime of their youth, and naked womens bodies - boyishly thin or voluptuously fat - with tightly bound breasts. All are taken in a morbid, backyard atmosphere in which one is constantly expecting a janitor to turn up and interfere with the proceedings.Saudek is himself determined to do away with the double-standards with which obsessions can only be indulged in secret dark-rooms. Instead he airs his dirty linen in public. The personal nature of his work was determined not only by the lasting impact which the photographic exhibition The Family of Man had on him, but also his experience, as a child, of narrowly escaping the appalling experiments of the concentration camp doctor Mengele.Saudek has survived all the political changes in his native Czechoslovakia, and today is one of the best-known photographers of the nude. With his poetic compositions and his hand-tinted pictures, the timeless strength of his photographs lies in their forceful - at times ribald - pictorial language, with its overtones of medieval genre pictures and Baroque mythology. Saudek planned this book himself and has included the best pictures from his latest creative cycle.