![]() ![]() One key experience for Jan Saudek was his encounter with the artistic work of Edward Steichen, whose monumental photo/text installation The Family of Man finally consolidated his resolve to be a photographer. Profoundly impressed by Edward Steichen first successes in the West ![]() In 1952 he completed an apprenticeship as photographer, and in 1959 received a more technically advanced camera from his young wife Marie, a FLEXARET 6X6, one which he still uses today. He started taking photographs at the age of fifteen, and his first camera was a Kodak Baby Brownie. After the war, US soldiers gave him chocolate wrapped in pages from American comics, and Saudek used these comics to learn the English language. Jan Saudek escaped the torments and horrors of this period by fleeing into debauched erotic fantasies, which he would later use as the basis of his photographic art. According to Saudek’s own account, he and his twin brother Karel were imprisoned in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele carried out experiments on them. The father survived, but the sons were murdered. ![]() His parents lived in a so-called ‘intermarriage’ and so the family were subjected to severe persecution – his father Gustav, a Jewish banker, was deported in 1945 to the concentration camp ‘Ghetto Theresienstadt’ together with six sons. Jan Saudek found his way to photography through detention and torture ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |