Josef Sudek - Sudek in Literature

Sudek in Literature

In addition to conventional biographies of Josef Sudek, John Banville's Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City introduces the reader to the city through the photographic lens of Joseph Sudek. Banville relates how he became enlisted to smuggle Sudek's photographs to the United States and through his tale and the story of Josef Sudek muses on the history of Prague in its gravity and melancholy, torn by war and oppression. 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.

More recently, Josef Sudek was used as a symbolic presence in Howard Norman's novel Devotion. The protagonist, David Kozol, was a photographer and mentored under Sudek. David Kozol remarks on the melancholy that pervaded Josef Sudek's work and a similar melancholy has settled through the novel. Sudek figures symbolically in the novel; David Kozol's mother in law worked as a book binder and it was through apprenticeship to a book binder that Josef Sudek became interested in photography. The characters seem to be symbolically injured or emotionally broken like the one armed Sudek and visual imagery figures prominently.

In 2006 the Dutch poet Hans Tentije published a bundle containing the poem: 'Met Josef Sudek op weg door Praag', 'On my way through Prague with Josef Sudek'. In nine parts the poet 'helps' Sudek with his photography.