JosefEhm

Josef Ehm (1909–1989) was a Czech photographer, teacher and editor whose work is closely identified with the New Objectivity current in Central European photography of the interwar and postwar decades. From 1934 to 1946 he taught at the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague, shaping a generation of photographers through his emphasis on formal precision and craft.

Between 1939 and 1941 Ehm co-edited the magazine Fotografický obzor (Photographic Horizon) together with Jaromír Funke, one of the leading theorists of modern Czech photography, and in 1943 he contributed photographs to the portfolio Modern Czech Photography, a key document of the era’s photographic ambitions under wartime constraint.

Across the 1930s to 1960s, Ehm built a quiet, disciplined body of work encompassing still lifes of musical instruments, portraits, and natural and urban landscapes, marked by a purist attention to form and material. His photographs display the combination of sober objectivity and technical perfection that characterized the best of Czech modernist photography.

Ehm is recognized as one of the photographers whose postwar work helped preserve and transmit the formal achievements of the prewar avant-garde into the new pragmatism of Czech photography after 1945.