Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Young and old, fat and thin -- Jan Saudek's camera makes love to them all.
Jun 7, 2001 | Jan Saudek doesn't mind admitting it: He likes a woman with a fat ass. Unlike fellow erotic photographers such as Helmut Newton, whose Euro-babe models seem to subsist on a diet of champagne and heroin, Saudek, 66, happily dives head first into the mountains and valleys of jiggling flesh proffered by his mostly Czech trollops. Plus-size beauties are a recurring theme in his work. Sometimes they bend over while Saudek spanks their glorious, globelike keisters with handfuls of switches. Or they might spank each other, skip rope or simply crouch nude on all fours with wildflowers crowning their heads and saggy green socks on their feet.
Indeed, in one of the Prague maestro's favorite hand-tinted, sepia prints, titled "The Burden," Saudek stands nearly naked with his back to the camera while his former wife, Maria, sits atop his shoulders -- her creamy, gargantuan derrière apparently having swallowed Saudek from the neck up. Looking at that woman's divine posterior, bathed as it is in blue, one fantasizes about drowning in the folds of her massive sex.
Yet Saudek doesn't want folks to think he's all about the booty, or perversely obsessed with obesity. "I hate to read that I am the photographer of fat women," Saudek complains via phone from the Czech Republic. "I am the photographer of everything; even landscapes I've tried. But I admit that though my girlfriend is skinny, I admire fat women and love them. They are so natural in front of my camera because they know I'm not making fun of them or trying to humiliate them. They know I'm serious. Next Sunday, I'll have the greatest session with three extremely fat ladies and one skinny guy. I can't wait!"
Saudek's enthusiasm translates into gold. Published by Taschen and renowned worldwide for his raunchy, kitsch-filled postcards that hark back to late-19th century portraiture, Saudek is a living, breathing anachronism with his use of painted black-and-white photos, his fondness for 1940s-era cameras and his posed shots of "naughty" scenes using a variety of antique props.
The enormously prolific Saudek has been wildly popular in Europe since the '70s, despite communism's tyrannical stranglehold on Czech society up until the 1989 Velvet Revolution. And his ubiquitous presence on postcard stands from Los Angeles to Paris speaks to his uncanny ability to tap into the tastes of construction workers and intellectuals alike. French magazine Photo recently referred to Saudek as the creator of a uniquely "baroque and decadent universe."
Truly, Saudek's is art with dirty fingernails, epitomizing what the French refer to as "nostalgie de la boue," a longing for the gutter.
"The only French I learned from the few French girlfriends I've had is 'Je suis primitive.' You understand? See, I'm not a very complicated guy. I'm a very plain guy, and I put it straight. Several times I met Mr. Joel-Peter Witkin in Paris and here in Prague, and I like his work, but it's too complicated for me. I prefer to make art for the masses, not for a few intellectuals," Saudek declares.
In keeping with this sentiment, every aspect of human femininity is represented in Saudek's earthy, erotic buffet: a whorish woman with floppy veined tits and a mouth oozing semen cocks her head back brazenly; an auburn-haired temptress with a bush so thick you could grow mushrooms in it bends an arm back behind her head and licks her equally hairy pit; two half-clothed strumpets, one tall and thin, the other short and round, copulate like dogs, the tall one sounding a victory note on a brass horn while gripping the other's ass; a wrinkled matron with gray hair (Saudek's mother) disrobes while holding a framed photo from her youth before her chest; and a teenage girl, boyish in build, sits on a stool covered in rough fur, her wrists crossed in front of her pussy.
Though Saudek's pictures are regularly used to illustrate magazines worldwide, he has turned down offers from Czech Playboy to shoot centerfolds and he generally dislikes the sort of models who look like they've emerged from the pages of a high-end stroke mag.
"Once, a Playboy Playmate from the Czech Republic asked if I would take some photos of her," recalls Saudek. "I said, 'No, no, no.' But after a year of trying, she was successful. So I shot her, and it was a disaster. She was beautiful, but there was nothing on her I could hold on to. A model must be natural. She must be a human being, a real person. That Playboy Playmate was artificial. I lifted up her breasts to see if there were scars from implants, and they were real! They just looked fake. Still it was no good. I cannot work with mannequins. With them I fail."
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