Immediate pleasure Josef Sudek’s poetry of light BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Rich, sepia tones, domestic yet impersonal subject matter, and an overriding 19th-century atmosphere — those are the signature if superficial qualities associated with the photographs of Josef Sudek. And they combine with the man’s biography, a story of anguish and suffering and loss, to make most viewers of "Josef Sudek, Poet with a Camera" arrive with some sense of what they’re in for. I was lucky: I was ignorant. A friend had steered me to a thumbnail sketch of Sudek’s personal history — the physical shattering as a World War I soldier, the almost hermetic life in Prague — and I’d seen exactly one image of his before going to the show. So I entered the Museum of Fine Arts’ Trustman Gallery as one of the fortunate, ready for surprise, or conversely for any of surprise’s many opposites.

Surprise and delight, dismay and awe, sadness and sadness’s most unexpected cousin, excitement, were all there to accompany me as I took in this most poignant and engaging exhibit. If you’ve never heard about or seen Josef Sudek’s photographs, stop reading and go. If you know the work, read on and then treat yourself by going.

Josef Sudek was born 108 years ago — he died in 1976, at age 82 — in a small town near Prague. The poor son of a laborer, he apprenticed as a bookbinder and began, as people of all ages have since photography’s invention, to take pictures. A year after the beginning of World War I, he was drafted and sent to the Italian front, and in a "friendly fire" mishap, he took a bullet in the shoulder from one of his own comrades. "After several unsuccessful operations," Gillian Shallcross writes in the elegant brochure that accompanies the show, "his right arm was amputated."

No point is made of this amputation as a formative part of his art in Shallcross’s sensitive and restrained text, yet the significance of Sudek’s injury and its lifelong repercussions is hard to miss, beginning with the direction his imagery took upon his return from Italy. One of the oldest photos in the show, From the Veterans Hospital, which may date back to 1922, when Sudek was a student at the State School of Graphic Arts, takes as its subject the building and perhaps even the men whom the teenage Sudek knew during his ordeal and recovery. In its pensive, subdued way, it’s an electrifying photograph. The invalids, even more absorbed in themselves than in the chess game that’s going on, dwell at the farthest extension of the surrounding refracted light. They’re incarnations where the sunbeams end, silhouettes, sharply visible yet unidentifiable. And it’s in that combination of luminosity and invisibility, social engagement and personal withdrawal (the man standing is looking at his hands), brightness and hospitalization, that Sudek achieves the presence and the sharpness and the disconnectedness we associate with Ibsen and Beckett. His dramas are pitched, acerbic, and penetrating, but the tone has been softened to cushion the impact: the one-eyed mask fixed to a wall-clinging vine (Remembrances of E.A. Poe); the figure whose lower body disappears as the torso occupies a lawn chair (Remembrance of Mr. Magician). The result is a complexity, formal and psychological, that defies pigeonholing: sadness belongs to games and celebrations, excitement and sensuality belong to still lifes. You can’t even call it irony; there’s nothing wry or sarcastic or otherwise aloof in his images. They’re simply heartfelt and fiendishly smart, comedic and haunting, unadorned and resonant.

We learn too from Shallcross that for a period between 1924 and 1926, Sudek embarked on what would become his first photographic series, outdoor, soft-focus photos of groups of people at leisure, like Sunday Afternoon on Kolin Island. And again, it’s hard not to see those pictures of warmth and relaxation and camaraderie as the inverse of his hospital-ward photos. It’s as if the photographer, having addressed the physical and social confines of his recuperation, had decided to confront the world to which he would never belong, a world of privilege and pleasure and nonchalance.

Yet no Sudek photo is ever what it first appears to be. The three men at the center of Sunday Afternoon with their backs to the camera — and with their backs to the one-armed photographer who has single-handedly set up his tripod, affixed his camera, inserted his photographic plate or film, and taken his shot — stare off to the right at the same exact angle, as evenly spaced as bowling pins. The shadows they cast suggest buildings. The picnic’s over, but they’re talking to no one. Only the boy in the soft cap and the startled, almost antagonistic posture is aware of the picture taking; he’s looking directly into the camera but at such a distance as to be initially unnoticeable. The combination of the boy’s focused surprise and the men’s post-prandial disregard takes the image out of the realm of pictorialist imitation of Seurat and turns it into a barbed yet subtle momentary drama.

But Josef Sudek’s amputation was to affect his art even more profoundly still. As Shallcross explains: "In 1926 . . . a trip to Italy apparently revived such painful memories of losing his arm that Sudek wandered aimlessly for two months. ‘From that time,’ he remembered, ‘I never went anywhere and I never will.’ More than ever, his life centered on Prague."

I would argue that in that moment of consummate resignation and withdrawal, Sudek became a great artist. The most outstanding photographs in his œuvre are not the brooding, crystalline panoramas of Prague, and neither are they the charming, almost whimsical and uniformly deft photographs of the garden of the architect Otto Rothmayer, a project that became A Walk in a Magic Garden. Instead, in his disavowal of the larger world, a disavowal intensified by World War II, Sudek discovered the poetry of common objects, the mystery of looking out his studio window, the excitement of his own cluttered, disheveled space.

The 1954 Still Life holds up as one of the most insidiously delicate and weirdly provocative pictures of our time. Sudek’s surfaces are invariably simple to the point of appearing pedestrian; here an apple, a vase, and an eggshell dominate the frame. Yet he both undermines and amplifies our understanding of those objects. The curve of the leaf on the apple stem mimics the curve of the eggshell, with the result that the apple implies it’s been laid and the shell suggests that it’s flora. And the transparent central vase with its patterned etching holds in its water what you take to be a flower stem — that is, until you scrutinize it. When you do, you realize that the blossom is missing and that the leaves look unnaturally sparse and round. Only after gazing at the picture for a long time did I appreciate the correspondences, the visual rhyming, among the textures of the glass of the vase, the striations on the nearby curtain, and whatever it is that lies on or beyond the windowpane like some aqueous egg case. Finally, I spotted what had been before my eyes the whole time, tucked beneath the apple leaf, a small, shadowy, upright tack; it works like a tiny reminder of our constant proximity to pain.

No less riveting and memorable are the images Sudek took from his studio window, images that are as much about the play of light through the condensation on the glass as they are about the objects on the other side. In From the Window of My Atelier, sheets hang on a clothes line that appears to encompass a tree. What you can’t see in a newspaper or even the catalogue reproduction of that photo is how the condensation isn’t blurry at all; it’s as sharp and pointed and lustrous as mica. The result is that the actual photograph appears icy and brittle, as if we were standing not before a photo but before the actual window through which Sudek looked. What at first seems like abstraction turns out to be in the service of palpable immediacy.

"Josef Sudek: Poet with a Camera"

In the Museum of Fine Arts’ Trustman Gallery through January 17.