Gelatin silver print, printed in 1950s/1960s
cm 9 x 29 | 3.5 x 11.4 in.
Signed in pencil on the verso


Although his right arm was amputated while wounded on the Italian front during the Great War, Joseph Sudek took up photography after abandoning his career as a bookseller. A keen observer of his hometown Prague, he began by meticulously documenting Saint Vitus Cathedral, but his most intimate and refined works were those taken from the window of his studio overlooking a garden where plants became a constant subject. At the end of the 1950s, he bought an old Kodak view camera for panoramic plates with which he photographed his city in a delicate way.