Igor Dryomin:
Jan Saudek, exhibition in Moscow

Jan Saudek. If you type this name in the search, then most of the links will give us almost identical answers: “Jan Saudek is a cult person in the history of photography.”

His pictures evoke a wide variety of emotions. For me personally: from admiration to disgust. For some reason, the work of Jan Saudek, and his personality, causes me to associate with Salvador Dali.

By the way, on the official website of the photo artist, an autobiography deserves special attention, which describes many interesting details. Typically, such details are laid out about themselves by stars, confident that their fans are interested in absolutely all the most intimate details of their life. If someone is less fluent in English (or Czech), I recommend reading at leisure: a fascist concentration camp passed by a child, all relatives died in other fascist concentration camps… On the site you can also find interesting works by Jan’s wife, Sarah Saudekova. In her works there is a peculiarity of the female look.

It seems to me that Jan Saudek (like Salvador Dali again), both in life and in art, wants to be bohemian and extreme. However, in my opinion, the works of Saudek are already quite extreme, and not all pictures can be called chaste.

Text: Tatyana von Wardenburg