Josef Sudek, "the poet of Prague," was originally a bookbinder. In 1916, he was badly injured in action during World War I, and his right arm was amputated. Soon after, he was given a camera and studied photography with the renowned Czech modernist photographer Jaromir Funke. His earliest Pictorialist pictures have a romantic quality upon which he later expanded. Later, Sudek's still lifes and garden scenes conveyed a distinctively modernist vocabulary as well as a sense of intimate longing.
