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Dubbed the "poet of Prague," Josef Sudek (1896-1976) was one of the most important and celebrated of Czech photographers. Sudek produced his best work during his middle-aged years, having grown up and out of the rules of modernism and into a style of his own. Whereas his photographs from the 1930s are mainly a reflection of the external world, by the 1940s he was returning to himself, finding his own unique creative path. It was during this period that he made his most famous photograph, a view of the world seen through his studio window, the window ledge doubling as a stage for still-life objects--a setup which he repeated to great effect. Not even the pressures of World War II and the difficult postwar years--including the demands of socialist realism in the arts--interrupted the continuity of his oeuvre, documented in this back-in-print volume.

In the 1960s, Miroslav Tichy (born 1926) began to take photographs of local women in his home town of Kyjov, Moravia, using cameras he made out of scrap. Quietly and surreptitiously working away over the decades, he was discovered by the photo-community in 2004. This volume provides an affordable introduction to his elusive and voyeuristic work.

Josef Sudek (1896-1976) was Prague's Atget. From the mid-1920s until his death in 1976, Sudek photographed everything--the Gothic and Baroque architecture, the streets and objects--usually leaving the frame free of people. Because he was reclusive, a large portion of Sudek's work was captured through his studio window: he was particularly fond of how the glass refracted light. The Window of My Studio series, spanning from the beginning of the Second World War to the first half of the 1950s, presents the series, which was of fundamental importance to Sudek, for it caused his work to move further into a surreal or Magic Realist style, with blurred images and strong shadows. Photography historian Anna Fárová contributes an introduction and an extensive biographical chronology to this volume--now back in print--which also includes a complete bibliography of portfolios, books and catalogues of Sudek's work.

The series of photographs that Joseph Sudek created in the Mionsí Forest of Morovia's Beskid Mountains is perhaps the most classically Romantic and visually stunning body of work ever made by this important Czech photographer. In the late 1920s, while shooting the interior of Prague's iconic Cathedral of St. Vitus during its final phase of completion, Sudek learned a great deal about light. Years later, alone, deep in the virgin forest, he lay in wait for the light that he knew would lend the ancient trees their ghostly aspect--finding graceful compositions in isolated wilderness. Photography historian Antonín Dufek penned the introduction to this volume, which is the first to present such a comprehensive set of Sudek's photographs of the Mionsí Forest, the ruins surrounding Hukvaldy castle and the foothills of the Beskids. Josef Sudek, born in 1896 in Kolín, was a bookbinder and amateur photographer for several years before studying at the State School of Graphic Arts with Karel Novak. Along with a handful of other young Modernists, he founded the Czech Photographic Society in 1924. While maintaining a successful commercial career, Sudek nurtured a lifelong, Romantic fascination with light and mood. He died at the age of 80 in 1976.

Though Alfons Mucha, known as Alphonse Mucha, (1860-1939) achieved lasting international acclaim as an Art Nouveau painter, graphic designer and decorator, his photography is not as well known. In this new, expanded edition produced in cooperation with the Mucha Trust, an intimate and accomplished photographer is revealed. A kind of sketchbook and personal visual diary, this record of captured moments from the mid-1880s until the end of the artist's life illuminates both Mucha's career as an artist and the time in which he lived. In addition, the behind-the-scenes glimpses of his studio prove that Mucha--a key creator of the ideal of Art Nouveau beauty--was one of the pioneers of the classic nude in Czech photography. For lay readers and photographic connoisseurs alike, this volume illuminates a unique and powerful artistic vision.

A theorist, critic, organizer, editor, teacher, and pioneer of modern photography, Funke was one of the few Czech photographers to grasp the international context of avant-garde photography, painting, and sculpture. Founder of "Photogenism," his pictures responded to Cubism, New Objectivity, Constructivism, Poetism, and Surrealism.

Moravian photographer Vojta Dukát (born 1947) went into exile in the Netherlands after Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Soviet Army in 1968. This monograph displays his intimate, black-and-white images of people conducting mundane, ritualistic tasks.

Despite a career that was curtailed at the age of 29, Vladimír Jindrich Bufka (1887-1916) was one of the most distinctive early-twentieth-century art photographers in Prague and indeed in all of Austria-Hungary. Bufka drew on contemporary artistic movements such Impressionism, Symbolism and Cubism for his pioneering prints using the demanding process of gum printing.

The Czech photojournalist Jindrich Marco (1921-2000) is best known for his World War II photographs, which, rather than depicting killing fields, captured the ordinary citizens of war-torn cities like Berlin, Dresden and Warsaw returning home and attempting to pick up the pieces. This monograph includes these and later series made throughout Europe in happier times.

A member of the 1980s Slovak New Wave generation of photographers trained under Jan mok, Peter Zupnik (born 1961) searches out hidden poetry in everyday objects, by means of close-ups, short depth of field and additional painting. Zupnik's series "Little Big Things" is perhaps the best-known example of his approach, of which he was virtually a pioneer in Czechoslovakia.

Working in black and white, Ivan Pinkava (born 1961) casts his subjects as contemporary incarnations of classical and Biblical persons: Narcissus, Sebastian, Salome, Cain and Abel. He has extended this idea to create imaginary portraits of writers who have gained iconic stature, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Sylvia Plath.

Jan Sagl, born in Humpolec, Bohemia, in 1942, is a pioneer of color photography in the Czech Republic. He is known for his photographs of landscapes and inconspicuous corners of cultural metropolises, as well as the design work he did for psychedelic concerts with his wife, the artist Zorka Saglova.

The work of the legendary late photographer and samizdat publisher Bohumil "Bob" Krcil, who was born in 1952, is little known in his native country. He left Czechoslovakia in 1969, and for the next 23 years, traveled extensively through much of Europe and Asia, photographing what he encountered. He had a knack for being in the right place at the right time: He captured the Afghan city of Herat before the Soviet invasion, the hashish culture of the Indian part of the Himalayas and New York, where he eventually settled on the Lower East Side, in the 1980s, in a straightforward, documentary style. Of his New York work, The Prague Post wrote, "Like his work from other points across the globe, the photos of New York mostly capture people on the streets or in shops, all of whom seem to radiate the special energy of the city. Even his cityscapes without people are full of life. The best photo from this series is "The Twins in the Wind" (1983), showing the towers of the World Trade Center rising above a mound of earth and utterly isolated against the sky, almost as if they were alone in a desert, touching the clouds." Like his prominent friends, photographers Josef Koudelka and Antonín Kratochvíl, Krcil lived and worked in exile. He is remembered for his innate openness, tolerance and amiability--traits that made him a natural traveler. This publication includes an essay by Jitka Hlavackova, an art historian at Prague City Gallery.

After the Second World War, Czech avant-garde photographer Eva Fukova and her first husband, Vladimir Fuka, were close to the artists of Skupina 42. In 1967, they emigrated to the United States, where Eva Fukova has continued to make work that renders the familiar strange by blending absurdity with raw inspiration.

The oeuvre of the leading Czech avant-garde photographer Eugen Wiskovsky (1888-1964) is not large in size or subject range, but it is noteworthy in its originality, depth of ideas, and mastery. Wiskovsky's early New Objectivist works, from the late 1920s and early 1930s, sought artistic effect in apparently nonaesthetic objects: His inventive lighting and cropping allowed their elementary lines to stand out, to lose their worldly associations and take on potential metaphorical meanings. In his dynamic diagonal compositions, Wiskovsky was among the most radical practitioners of Czech Constructivism. His landscape work is similarly distinctive. With text from Vladimmr Birgus, a historian of photography and the head of the Institute of Creative Photography at Silesian University, Opava, in the Czech Republic.

Published together for the first time are the photographs taken by the Czech photographer Zden Tmej during the years 1942-1944 in Breslau, Prussia, where he and others were taken to perform forced labor for the Nazis. Easily the most important and extensive visual documentation of the forced labor camps, these photos have both artistic and historical value.

Born in 1907, Alexandr Hackenschmied is one of the founders of modern Czech photography and film. He is better known here as Sasha Hammid, the name he took upon becoming a United States citizen in 1947, having fled Nazi persecution in his native Czechoslovakia in 1939. Since then he and his wife, Maya Deren, have played a key role in American avant-garde film. Both by himself and in collaboration with other artists, Hackenschmied made a number of important documentaries--including the 1964 film To Be Alive!, made with Francis Thompson, which was awarded an Oscar for Best Documentary in 1967. His photographic work, though less well known here, is equally worthy of praise. In it we see his dynamic conception of space--honed with years of experience as a cameraman and editor--and the combination of formal perfection with deep emotional resonance, the meeting of the artist's mind with the mind of the audience.