"Timm Rautert met Josef Sudek for the first time on a study trip to Prague in the spring of 1967. The photography student and the seventy-one-year-old Sudek instantly took to each other, and Rautert began photographing the artist at his studio and home. He accompanied him on his strolls in parks in Little Prague on the left bank of the Vltava river as he searched for adequate perspectives, and documented his work process in and outside the darkroom. The Sudek series is an extraordinary chronicle of a fascinating personality and place in the run-up to the Prague Spring, and marks the beginning of Rautert's career during which the portrait and people at work were always of major importance to him." -- publisher's description

"Still Lifes is the third volume in Josef Sudek: Works, a new series published by Torst, Prague, This volume includes 68 carefully selected photos by the great Czech photographer Josef Smick (1896-1976), superbly printed to show the range of colors resulting from toning. It also includes a chronological biography by Anna Famva (b. 1928), a leading Czech photography historian and close friend of Sudek's, and an introductory essay by Jan Marius Tomes (b. 1913) a leading Czech art historian and also a friend of Sudek's." --Book Jacket.

In 1974 the young Timm Rautert travelled to Pennsylvania to photograph those who would normally not allow themselves to be photographed: the Amish, a group of Anabaptist Protestant communities. Four years later Rautert returned to America, this time to the Hutterites who live so stringently by the Ten Commandments and the bible's restrictions on images that they have their identity cards issued without photographs. Both these two series were influential on Rautert's later work and No Photographing brings them together for the first time.

Rückseite Titelblatt: Published in conjunction with the exhibition "The Intimate World of Josef Sudek", organized by the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada and held at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, June 7-September 25, 2016 and at the National Gallery of Canada, October 28, 2016-March 19, 2017. -.

Timm Rautert has been an experimental photographer, a photojournalist, a portraitist and, since 1993, a professor. Following his 1974 book, Deutsche in Uniform, recently reissued, he has continued to photograph his countrymen, devoting much of his time to extensive series, including one from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2000. When We Don't See You You Don't See Us Either refers in title to the portraitist's vocation of seeing and being seen, and offers Rautert's career for the same defining scrutiny, a portrait of its own. This definitive portfolio spans more than 35 years of distinguished work, much of which has never before been published for English-language audiences

Prague is the magic capital of Europe. Since the days of Emperor Rudolf II, 'devotee of the stars and cultivator of the spagyric art', who in the late 1500s summoned alchemists and magicians from all over the world to his castle on Hradcany hill, it has been a place of mystery and intrigue. Wars, revolutions, floods, the imposition of Soviet communism, or even the depredations of the tourist boom after the 'Velvet Revolution' of 1989, could not destroy the unique atmosphere of this beautiful, proud and melancholy city on the Vltava. John Banville traces Prague's often tragic history and portrays the people who made it, the emperors and princes, geniuses and charlatans, heroes and scoundrels, and paints a portrait of the Prague of today, revelling in its newfound freedoms, eager to join the European Community and at the same time suspicious of what many Praguers see as yet another totalitarian takeover. He writes of his first visit to the city, in the depths of the Cold War, when he engaged in a spot of art smuggling, and of subsequent trips there, of the people he met, the friends he made, the places he came to know.