Photographer: Jan Saudek

Published on 15 August 2026

There's a poster that has followed me from apartment to apartment forever. It's a photo by Jan Saudek. I discovered him very young, at an exhibition in Paris; the shock was immediate and it has stayed with me ever since. So I'm finally starting something I've been putting off for years: a series of articles about the photographers I love. And naturally, I'm starting with him.

Saudek was born in Prague in 1935, along with his twin brother Kája. Czech mother, Jewish father. A large part of the family died in the Theresienstadt camp, and the two boys ended the war interned in a children's camp near what is now the Polish border. They were ten years old. You probably can't understand his photos without knowing all this (I had read the explanation panels at the exhibition back then, so I had the full context).

After the war, he became a print shop worker, with a first camera received in 1950, a little Kodak Baby Brownie. Then in 1963 he came across the catalog of The Family of Man, Edward Steichen's exhibition, and that was the trigger. Photography would be his life. The communist regime, for its part, despite a certain artistic openness, forced him to hide a large part of his nudes.

Almost all of his work was therefore done in secret, in a Prague cellar, with the police prowling not far away. The setting almost never changes. A crumbling wall, a window. And in front of this wall pass naked bodies, voluptuous women, infants, old people, desire, time doing its work. He then colors his black and white prints by hand, one by one, which gives his images that air of an old erotic postcard you recognize immediately.

The West and its freedoms finally spotted him at the end of the 70s, a first book came out in English in 1983, and there he was, the most famous Czech photographer in the world. His twin Kája, a monument of local comics, died in 2015. Jan is still here at 91, and still exhibits.

So yes, you can find it kitsch, disturbing, too blunt, and I quite understand closing the book. Personally, I sometimes find tenderness and cruelty in the same shot, an entire life from birth to decay, without cheating or moralizing. No other photography has that effect on me.

If you have photographers you'd like me to discover, think about joining the Telegram group, that's what it's for too!