Josef Sudek 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. Where Atget photographed the social realities of Paris, Sudek captured a more subjective experience of the city where he was born. Because he was reclusive, a large portion of Sudek's body of 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, has never previously been compiled in one volume. This publication presents the series, which was of fundamental importance to Sudek, for it caused his work to verge even more into a Surreal or Magical Realist style, with blurred images and strong shadows. Photography historian Anna Farova contributes an introduction and an extensive biographical chronology to this volume, which also includes a complete bibliography of portfolios, books and catalogues of Sudek's work, as well as a complete list of his exhibitions — information that is difficult to find elsewhere. The publication has been produced in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Saint Vitus's Cathedral is the sixth volume in Torst's Josef Sudek: Works series. This volume is the first to compile Sudek's photos of St. Vitus's Cathedral, the spiritual and cultural heart of the Czech Republic, from various periods of Sudek's work. It includes photos that he lovingly prepared for a book that was ultimately never published, titled Svat Vit.

Though Alfons Mucha (1960-1939) 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.

Frantisek Drtikol (1883 1961) is considered to be the first Czech photographer enjoying international fame. Anna Fárová s legendary exhibit in Prague in 1972 led to the rediscovery of his briefly forgotten work. This elaborate, illustrated volume is devoted to the nude portraits, one of the focal points in Dritkol s oeuvre. Art Nouveau and Symbolism were strong influences on his early photographs, in which his nudes are presented as dreamy nymphs or femme fatales. After the end of World War I, he developed his own fascinating photographic style, characterized by geometric elements, expressive, dynamic poses, and dramatic lighting. An Art Deco photographer, as Fárová called him, Drtikol was inspired by Futurism, Expressionism, and Cubism to discover his own lyrical, formal vocabulary.

Although the Czech photographer Josef Sudek was mildly reclusive by temperament, and although his photography is commonly characterized as un-peopled (in favor of what he termed the inanimate life of objects), a sizeable portion of his oeuvre is given over to portraits. In fact, the beginnings of Sudek's work are in portraiture, in his images of fellow patients at the veteran's hospital where he spent three years after the First World War. (It was here that Sudek's right arm was amputated after a battlefield injury, a misfortune which did not prevent him from using heavy, large-format cameras in the future.) Decades later, after he had co-founded the Czech Photographic Society in 1924 and established his signature neo-Romantic preoccupation with architectural Prague, he returned to the genre. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Sudek photographed close friends, among them the poet and Nobel Laureate Jaroslav Seifert, many painters and writers, but also scientists, doctors, politicians, architects, actors and other important public figures in Czechoslovakia. Portraits, the second volume of Sudek's collected photographs, gathers this body of work. In addition to a chronology of Sudek's life, it includes a complete bibliography and list of his exhibitions, as well as an interview with Jan Rezac, Sudek's colleague and an expert on his work.