In recognition of Saudek’s artistic career, the Communist authorities allowed him in 1984 to quit his job at the printing press and to join the Czechoslovak Visual Artists Foundation, which was equivalent to his professional recognition as an artist. The same year he finally becomes a freelance photographer. In 1983 the first book of his work was published in the English-speaking world. Starting in the late 1970s, he began to be recognized in the West as the best Czech photographer.

Upon returning to Prague, he is forced to work clandestinely in a basement, to avoid the attention of the secret police, because in his work he dealt with issues of personal erotic freedom and used implicitly political symbols of corruption and innocence. In 1969 he traveled to the United States where art curator Hugh Edwards encouraged him to continue his artistic work and at Solo’s Bloomington University in Indiana he exhibited for the first time alone. Steichen’s book motivates him to exhibit for the first time in Prague. Later, he will affirm that with his work what he tries is “to capture all the things that I know and love, but above all I would like to leave a trace of the time in which I have lived”. Then he decides that what he really wants is to dedicate himself to photography and that his inspiration is exclusively the people with whom he has romantically linked. After completing his military service, in 1963 he was inspired, thanks to the catalog of the Edward Steichen Family of Man exhibition, to try to become a serious photographer. He is also interested in painting and drawing. In 1959 he started using a more advanced camera: Flexaret 6×6, which was a gift from his then wife, Marie. He was an apprentice photographer and in 1952 he started working in a printing press until 1983. Paradoxically, it will be these manually colored black and white photographs that characterize and make her work internationally recognizable today. He deemed her absolutely bad, kitsch and in an old-fashioned style, which discourages Saudek to continue photography for a while.

In 1951 he colors a photo, which his mother shows to the family doctor. He obtained his first camera, a Kodak Baby Brownie, in 1950 about which Saudek himself said: “the only thing that can be done with this camera is to load the film, press the button and take the photo and that is exactly what I have done until 1963 ”. Both sons and their father survived the war. His father Gustav was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in February 1945. Jan and his brother Karel were held in a concentration camp for children located near the current border between Poland and the Czech Republic. Many members of his family died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II. Saudek’s father was Jewish and this added to his Slavic (Czech) heritage caused his family to be targeted by the Nazis.

Jan Saudek is a photographer and plastic artist specialized in the nude.

Saudek by Jan Saudek