Angel With a Missing Wing: Loss, Restitution, and the Embodied Self in the Photography of Josef Sudek

Contextualized within his life story and his political and cultural milieu, the author interprets Josef Sudek's quest to find what had been lost as a driving force behind his life's work. Through the analysis of his photographic oeuvre, this essay will build a conceptual bridge between Sigmund Freud's formulations on mourning and identification, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of the embodied self. Synthesizing these contributions with Melanie Klein's theories on mourning and reparation, Hannah Segal's application of Klein to Proust, Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit, and its contemporary elaboration, après-coup, I will posit Sudek's work as an extension, reclamation, and re-creation of the self, and of the world that comprises the embodied self.