Madrid - Prague

We have found this beautiful text by Antonio Muñoz Molina in the last edition of Babelia only some hours after we have illustrated with a quotation from his Sefarad the importance of the celebrations of the Holy Week in Úbeda. The text, which perhaps intentionally imitates the “long sentences” of Bohumil Hrabal, speaks about Josef Sudek, whose photos have been recently exhibited for the first time after half century in Madrid. The life and figure of Sudek are just as enigmatic as the city he kept photographing in all his life, and his images have directly or indirectly determined the way we look at Prague.


Josef Sudek is a man roaming the streets of Prague, bent under the weight of a cumbersome and archaic camera and of a tripod of an itinerant photographer, a photographer left here from a previous epoch who takes his pictures hidden under the large black veil and slowly pressing the rubber ball of the releasing mechanism. In a Zen koan they ask how the clap of one hand sounds. The art of Josef Sudek has something of the fabulous resonance of this hand which cannot clap with the other, as he had lost his right arm on the Italian front during the First World War, and although sometimes an assistant helps him to stand up the camera, during his taciturn roamings over Prague he is always seen alone, the clumsy Kodak of 1894 and the tripod already became a part of his profile, just like the beret and the black coat and the left shoulder sinking always lower in lack of the counterweight of the right arm, already a phantasm and still painful, amputated in the field hospital. In 1926, when Josef Sudek had been a war invalid for almost ten years, he once again returned to Italy accompanying his friends from the Prague Philharmonics. Music was his other great love. In the middle of a concert he rose from his seat, left the theater like a somnambulant, and through deserted and dark streets he reached the outskirts of the town, wandering all through the night, this time free from the weight of the camera, lost in unknown landscapes. And in the gray fog of the dawn in a plain field he saw a farmhouse, and with the inappellable certainty of the dreams he knew that this was the farmhouse where he had been taken when he was wounded, when his arm was cut off. “But I have not found my arm,” he related later, although he did not tell where he had been after, while his friends from the orchestra were looking in vain for him before continuing the tour without him.


He returned from this journey and did not leave Prague any more. He rented a small studio looking onto a shady garden and there he worked and lived during the fifty years that were left to him. The war and the loss of the right arm swept his youth off. The obstacles on my way became my way, writes Nietzsche. It is possible that the real vocation is a way which opens by chance after all the other ones which looked more evident are closed. If they did not have to amputate his right arm at the height of the shulder because of a necrotized wound, Josef Sudek would have become a bookbinder. And without the small disability pension he received after the war he could have not devoted himself to photography, body and soul. He began by taking pictures of the veterans he met by chance in the hospitals, of those mutilated and spiritually distorted figures populating all Europe after the slaughter, but it took him years to find his own style. At the age of twenty he had to learn how to live with one arm less, how to manage the camera and the process of image development. But it was even more difficult to learn how to see those things that nobody paid attention to, although they were there before the eyes of everyone. To do so, he had to center himself, to choose or find a fix position in the chaos and multiplicity of the world, like sharpening the focus of a lens. In order to see Prague, Josef Sudek had to leave Prague for a while. He traveled to the south, and in that Italian dawn – with the fertile plains and hazy distances only interrupted by some houses or trees – he saw the same place again where his previous life had been broken by the machine-gun, and although he could not find his missing arm any more, but nevertheless he found his other, invisible arm and hand with which he could give form to the mystery of his poetic invention.


He did not need to leave any more. The farthest terra incognita he rambled to were the fields over the tramway terminuses. He strolled about the streets with the large camera on his shoulder, in a hurry to arrive to a certain constellation of the lights, or remaining still for several minutes waiting for the right moment under the black veil. He used to say that photographing is a strange art, as it cannot show the things openly, only through allusions, revealing only the necessary minimum in order the complete image be born in the look and in the imagination of the onlooker. The panoramic format of 30×10 permitted by his camera embraced the horizontality of a square or of a field in which the human silhouettes appear isolated in the distance, but are not lost in it, for sometimes they seem to be absorbed in contemplation like the background figures of a painting by Friedrich, and sometimes we see them walking with a determined purpose, men and women crossing a street in the downtown, or moving off towards a housing block after having got off from the tramway at the last station, which is already not in the city and not yet in the fields but somewhere on the outskirts from where the roofs and towers of Prague seem just slightly more than a jagged profile on the horizon.

• Gallery + + + + + • Catálogo 2009 • Film + + • Sudek + + + + + + + • Wikipedia (Czech) • Blog + + + + + + + • Sudek Studio • Books +

In the photos of Sudek Prague seems to be suspended in time, offuscated in the ambiguous lights of the sunsets and dawns, depopulated and silent in the humid winter nights ligthed by the phosphorescence of the fog or of the snow and traversed by tramways like by submarines with reflectors on their prow. This is that assaulted and tormented city where the refugees of half Europe sought shelter from the advancement of Nazism, the one retaining its breath when in the infamous pact of Munich of November 1938 the British and French permitted to Hitler to amputate half of the country, the one occupied in 1939 by the German army and by the efficient executioners of the Gestapo, the one which, only a few years after the end of the Nazi occupation, succumbed to the puppet regime of the Communists manipulated by the Soviets. Prague, which used to be in the heart of Europe, retired far behind the hermetism of the Iron Curtain: this is how we see her in these photos of Sudek from the fifties that are now exhibited in Madrid, in a silent room of the Círculo de Bellas Artes. A city of squares without traffic and of deserted nights in which the shudder of the military tattoo is still resounding, of statues full of pathos on the façades of the buildings, of windows covered with moisture, of shady gardens beaten up by the weeds that exhale the deep odour of humid earth and wet leaves. In the silence some steps resound on the cobblestones, the rumor of panting breath. The man of the sloping shoulder is sleeplessly roaming the city, in search of that light of the dawn which he only saw twice in his life, on the day when his arm was amputated, and on the day when, many years later, by wandering as in a dream, he found it.