The ossuary at the church of All Saints in Sedlec, near the Bohemian town of Kutna Hora, is one of the most remarkable Baroque monuments in the Czech Republic and is on the UNESCO list of protected architectural sites. The photographs in this book capture the monument shortly before its restoration in the 1990s.

Memento Mori

Arts & Photography

Novák, Robert

Hornya, Mojmir

Jirasek, Vaclav

Chlibec, Bohdan

Pinkava, Ivan

Photography & Video

Torst

The now-legendary photographer Bohdan Holomicek--born in 1943--has traveled throughout the Czech Republic for several years, recording a never-ending series of moments. In doing this, however, he is not so much seeking to act as a documentarian or photojournalist as he is seeking to assemble countless ordinary moments into something extraordinary, something as large as--not larger than--life. In the figure of Holomicek a rare unity of life and art is achieved. He is a highly individual chronicler of more than 30 years of life in the Czech region, and the personal and transcendental stamp he puts into his work communicates itself across boundaries of nation and ethnicity. This retrospective look at Holomicek's work contains beautiful duotone reproductions of the artist's images and serves as a splendid introduction to his oeuvre.

Bohdan Holomicek

Dufek, Antonín

Individual Artists

Though Alfons Mucha (1860-1939) achieved lasting international acclaim as an Art Nouveau painter, graphic designer, and decorator, his outstanding photography is not as well known. His photographic sketchbook and personal visual diary, comprising photographs from the mid-1880s until the end of his life, constitutes a unique and profound artistic statement. This mosaic of captured moments reveals the intimate and personal basis of both Mucha's own life as an artist and the time period in which he lived. The behind-the-scenes glimpses of his studio provided here prove that Mucha--the creator of the ideal of Art Nouveau beauty--was one of the pioneers of the classic nude in Czech photography. This is the first time such a large selection of Mucha's extensive photographic work has been assembled as a book. Many of the photos in this book, never before published, reveal hitherto unknown aspects of Mucha's work, which will be of interest to the general reader and the photographic connoisseur alike.

Alfons Mucha

MOUCHA, Josef

Published together for the first time are the photographs taken by the Czech photographer Zden Tmej during the years 1942-1944 in Breslau, Prussia, where he and others were taken to perform forced labor for the Nazis. Easily the most important and extensive visual documentation of the forced labor camps, these photos have both artistic and historical value.

Zdenek Tmej: Totaleisatz

Anna Farova

Associated with the Surrealists, painter, poet, writer ,and photographer Jindrich Styrsky first exhibited his photographs at the Group of Surrealists exhibition in Prague in 1935. His photographs, chiefly of shop windows, circuses, shooting galleries and funereal objects, resonates with the Surrealist poetry of the early 1930s, but are also rooted directly in his own unique imagination.

Jind ich Styrsky

Srp, Karel

Jaroslav Rossler (TORST)

Birgus, Vladimír

Czech documentary photographer Karel Cudlin's black-and-white images of Gypsies, refugees, and Ukrainian workers reveal compassion and sometimes humor, but always depth. He has worked for leading Czech magazines and newspapers, and frequently photographs president Vaclav Havel. His past publications include a monograph and Izrael.

Karel Cudlin

Silverio, Robert

Known mainly as a critic and organizer of events on the Czech art scene of the 1920s, Karel Teige was also a leading figure of the avant-garde group Devetsil and a member of the Prague Surrealists. Between 1934 and his premature death in 1951, he privately produced nearly 400 collages, many of which are reproduced here as a testament to their vital role in the history of European Surrealism.

Karel Teige (TORST)

Teige, Karel

History & Criticism

Known for his higly formalized, senisitive images of the vestiges of gypsy life, Czech photographer Josef Koudelka has been traveling the world since 1962, documenting their communities in Eastern Europe, England, Ireland, France, and Spain. Living as his subjects do, constantly on the move and defiantly independent, Koudelka has always refused magazine and commercial assignments, and has worked for years without a permanent darkroom. Focusing on the rituals of everyday life, on birth, marriage, and death, he has produced years of work, including the cycles reproduced here: Theater, Gypsies, Prague 1968 (Invasion), Exiles, and Chaos. These well-known series are complemented by lesser-known photographs from the 1950s. Included as well are an essay by Czech art historian Anna Farova, who has followed Koudelka throughout his career, and an expansive interview with the artist conducted by Karel Hvizdala over a period of 10 years.

Josef Koudelka (TORST)

Fárová, Anna

Dubbed the "poet of Prague," Josef Sudek was one of the most important and celebrated of Czech photographers. Sudek produced his best work during his middle-aged years, having grown up and out of the rules of Modernism and into a style of his own. Whereas his photographs from the 1930s are mainly a reflection of the external world, by the 1940s he was returning to himself, finding his own unique creative path. It was during this period that he made his most famous photograph, a view of the world seen through his studio window, the window ledge doubling as a stage for still life objects--a setup which he repeated to great effect. Not even the pressures of WWII and the difficult postwar years, including the demands of socialist realism in the arts, interrupted the continuity of his oeuvre.

Josef Sudek (Fototorst) (English and Czech Edition)

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