Josef Sudek

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.

His army disability pension gave him leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic Pictorialist style.

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[1] and thus worked "in the style of the times".

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 re-creates the anxiety that must have faced the photographer in a city where, under Nazi occupation, landscape photography could be a mortal offense.

The characters seem to be symbolically injured or emotionally broken like the one armed Sudek and visual imagery figures prominently.