Josef Sudek - Praha Panoramaticka (WITH ORIGINAL DUSTJACKET) - 1959

VERY SCARCE OPPORTUNITY to purchase this VERY IMPORTANT PHOTOBOOK -
with the extrem scarce and highly fragile ORIGINAL DUSTJACKET in great condition.

Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The Photobook, volume 1, page 211.

TRUE ORIGINAL FIRST PRINTING from 1959 -
not to mix with the same-named much later edition from 1992 (in a much worse printing).

Highly impressive panoramic views of Prague by Josef Sudek, the "Poet of Prague", the most famous photographer from Czechoslovakia:
"No photographer, save possibly Atget, was so devoted to the task of portraying a city, and with such stunning results, as Sudek"
(Sawyer, Creative Camera, No. 190, April 1980).

JOSEF SUDEK'S BEST PHOTOBOOK - in BREATH-TAKING PHOTOGRAVURE PRINTING.

Welcome to the LAST PHOTOBOOK AUCTION by 5Uhr30.com starting this year -
with more than 100 great lots from my personal collection and from recent acquisitions.
Like always we guarantee detailed and accurate descriptions, 100% transport protection, 100% transport insurance and of course combined shipping - worldwide.

Statni nakladatelstvi krasne literatury, hudby a umeni, Prague. 1959. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover with dustjacket. 230 x 350 mm. 304 pages. 288 photos in black and white. Photos: Josef Sudek. Text in Czech.

Condition:
Book inside and outside excellent, fresh and flawless; clean with no marks and with no foxing. Dustjacket much better and fresher than usual and highly impressive, with trace of use; tear at the bottom of the front and at the bottom of the front flap, neat missing part at the bottom of the spine. Overall fine condition.

Fantastic, very sought-after photobook classic by Josef Sudek -
with the extrem scarce, highly sensitiv original dustjacket (in this great condition extremely hard to find).

We THANK YOU SO MUCH to make our single-seller photobook auctions on Catawiki so successful.
Ecki Heuser & team are wishing ALL THE BEST TO YOU AND YOURS for 2025.

"Josef Sudek (1896-1976) was a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague.
Sudek was born in Kolín, Bohemia. He was originally a bookbinder. During the First World War he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm in 1916 which led to the limb being amputated at the shoulder. After the war he studied photography for two years in Prague under Jaromír Funke. His army disability pension gave him leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic Pictorialist style. Always pushing at the boundaries, a local camera club expelled him for arguing about the need to move forwards from 'painterly' photography. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras with the aid of assistants.
Sudek's photography is sometimes said to be modernist. But this is only true of a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography, including contributions to the illustrated Prague weekly Pestrý týden and thus worked "in the style of the times". Primarily, his personal photography is neo-romantic.
His early work included many series of light falling in the interior of St. Vitus Cathedral. During and after World War II Sudek created haunting night-scapes and panoramas of Prague, photographed the wooded landscape of Bohemia, and the window-glass that led to his garden (the famous The Window of My Atelier series). He went on to photograph the crowded interior of his studio (the Labyrinths series).
He first showed his work in "Five Photographers" at the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska/Lincoln in 1968. Then he showed at the George Eastman House in 1974 and he published 16 books during his life.
Known as the "Poet of Prague", Sudek never married, and was a shy, retiring person. He never appeared at his exhibit openings and few people appear in his photographs. Despite the privations of the war and Communism, he kept a renowned record collection of classical music.
In recent years, his work has frequently been reproduced in books, making his work some of the most readily accessible to those interested in twentieth-century Czech photography.
(Wikipedia)