Photographer: Jan Saudek

Published on 15 August 2026

There's a poster that has followed me from apartment to apartment for as long as I can remember. It's a photo by Jan Saudek. I discovered him when I was very young, at an exhibition in Paris, and the shock was immediate and has stayed with me ever since. So I'm finally starting something I've been putting off for years, doing a new series of articles about the photographers I love, and of course 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 at the Theresienstadt camp, and the two boys ended the war interned in a camp for children near what is now the Polish border. They were ten years old. You probably can't understand anything about his photos if you don't know all this (I had read the explanatory panels at the exhibition back then, so I had the whole context).

After the war, he became a print worker, with a first camera received in 1950, a little Kodak Baby Brownie. Then in 1963 he came across the catalogue of The Family of Man, Edward Steichen's exhibition, and that was the spark. 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.

So almost all of his work was done in secret, in a cellar in Prague, with the police prowling not far away. The setting hardly ever changes. A crumbling wall, a window. And in front of this wall pass naked bodies, buxom women, infants, old people, desire, time doing its work. He then colours his black-and-white prints by hand, one by one, which gives his images that look of an old erotic postcard that you recognise straight away.

The West and its freedoms eventually spotted him at the end of the 1970s, a first book came out in English in 1983, and there he was, become 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 exhibiting.

So yes, you can find it kitsch, disturbing, too frontal, and I understand quite well anyone who closes the book. Me, I sometimes find tenderness and cruelty in the same shot, a whole life from birth to decrepitude, without cheating or moralising. No other photography has that effect on me.

If you have ideas for photographers to introduce me to, remember to join the Telegram group, that's also what it's for!