About This Image

Photographer's name, title and date is stamped on verso. Some light handling marks.

Czech photographer Alexandr Paul was born in Rakovnik, in Western Bohemia on October 30, 1907.

After exceeding the learning objective of his primary school, the fourteen-year-old boy's dream was to become an aircraft mechanic, but at the Main Aircraft Workshops of the Airport in Kbely he discovered that he would have to be a trained car mechanic to be able to think about specializing in aviation.

Disappointed, he answered the first job advertisement, which was looking for a servant for the established photographic studio FotoIDEAL Zelenka in Karlín. After just one month, photographer Jindřich Zelenka suggested to Karel Paul that his son should learn photography from him.

After passing the apprenticeship and then the journeyman exam, Alexandr Paul worked briefly at the Centropress company, where he met his future partners, the head of the department, Dr. Pavel Altschul, and the head of the photo studio, František Illek. With them in 1931, he carried out an interesting and successful experiment, creating the Press Photo Service (PPS) photography agency, with photographers Illek and Paul. In 1934, Pavel Altschul became independent and published the illustrated magazine "Světozor" (1933-1939).

In the 1930s, the PPS company at Jungmannova Street No. 37 was one of the most important Czech studios, largely setting the tone in applied and advertising photography and in images of monuments. Photographers Alexandr Paul and František Illek proved that it was possible to create "custom-made" images by promoting the quality of images, departing from the ready-made cut of similar studios at the time. Alexandr Paul probably ran the most modern studio of his time. At the beginning of their careers, some important photographers worked in this agency, including Vilém Heckel, Jindřich Brok, Fred Kramer, and Dagmar Hochová.

Alexandr Paul promoted the direction of modern journalism in the period 1930-1940 together with Pavel Altschul, František Illek , Karel Hájek , Václav Jírů and Jan Lukas. He was a member of the film-photo group of the Left Front, the so-called Fi-Fo (founded in 1931), which in 1933 held the exhibition International Social Photography in Prague.

From the 1930s he was a member of the Umělecká Beseda, in the artistic environment of artists, studios, architects and other artistic disciplines. Thanks to the Beseda House, Alexandr Paul was also connected with the beginnings of the Osvobozené Divadlo. A unique photographic documentation of all the productions of the Osvobozené Divadlo by Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich from 1931-1938 was created. In the interwar period, Beseda organized important exhibitions, which ultimately culminated in two groundbreaking events of international scope: Old Art in Slovakia (1937) and the monumental exhibition, "Art in Bohemia of the 17th and 18th Centuries", together with the Prague Baroque festival (1938).

The pre-war exhibitions were a great success and led to the idea of ​​bringing fine arts even closer to a wide range of the public. Under the auspices of the Umělecká Beseda, on the initiative of Karel Šourek, Prof. Čeněk Chyský and Alexander Paul, an edition was created in 1940 that would present fine arts using photographic techniques.

The company, which had just been renamed Fotografové Illek a Paul, began to implement a progressive project: the edition Documenta Bohemiae Artis Phototypica, a collection of black-and-white photographs of important monuments, taken directly by photography. This was a unique set not only in the work of Alexander Paul, but in all of Czechoslovak photography; the cultural and artistic treasures of Bohemia began to be systematically mapped. The volumes Gothic Sculpture of the 14th Century in the House of St. Vitus in Prague (Přemyslid tombstones and busts of the patron saints of Bohemia, builders and architects of churches), a set of 117 photographs, three sets of illuminated medieval manuscripts of the monastery in Rajhrad from the 14th century, as well as the Denarii collection from the collections of the National Museum. Furthermore, for example, the Boskovice Bible, Doksany near Roudnice - the Romanesque crypt of the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, Předklášteří near Tišnov, the Church of Our Lady before Týn, the Emmaus Monastery, various locations including Prague.

The largest set was to be dedicated to Karlštejn Castle, 300 to 400 photographs, with an emphasis on Master Theodoric in the Chapel of the Holy Cross. The processing took place between 1944 and 1945, but post-war events did not allow the work to be completed. In 1948, the Illek and Paul company ceased operations, and so did the Documenta Bohemiae Artis Phototypica edition. A similar order for mapping the monuments of England could no longer be implemented. During the edition's existence, tens of thousands of photographs were sent out in bundles and individually, and several hundred original individual photographs have survived to this day. Photographers František Illek and Alexandr Paul became founding members of the Association of Fine Arts, so they could continue to work in the studio as photographers-artists.

Alexandr Paul and his family also lived in Čimelice from the late 1930s. They include a convolute of rolls of photographs found during the eviction from the Adria Palace, in which he documented the end of the war in a unique way: the meeting of German, Russian and American troops.

At the Expo 58 World Exhibition in Brussels, Alexandr Paul received the Diplome d'honneur and a medal for a set of large-scale color photographs of Czechoslovak monuments (3x1m). In the second half of the 20th century, Alexandr Paul contributed his black-and-white and color photographs of art-historical monuments, representing his post-war work, to a number of publications on Czech fine art. He collaborated, for example, with art historians Viktor Kotrba, Josef Krása, Dobroslava Menclová, Jaromír Neumann, Emanuel Poche and others.

In 1956, by mutual agreement, he and František Illek shared the studio and archive; Alexandr Paul kept the negatives of architecture, applied and folk art from the archive, as well as the negatives of the works of his friends who came to the Adria Palace. Gradually, his wife, Růžena Paulová, worked in the studio as a retoucher, and his sons, photographers Petr, Pavel, Prokop and Alexander Paul, the Younger. The last exhibition in his life was the exhibition "Art of the Time of the Last Přemyslids", which he prepared with his son Prokop. He died on the day of the exhibition's opening, December 1, 1981.

He achieved international fame, among other things, with his collection of photographs of Baroque architecture. The photographs of the large exhibition Bohemian Baroque from 1969 (100 photographs, Old Town Hall in Prague) were rescued and restored in 2011 by his son, Prokop Paul, who organized a photography exhibition from this collection in 2012 in the Topič Salon in Prague under the title "Alexandr Paul – Photographer". In 2013, this ensemble formed part of the retrospective exhibition "Alexandr Paul – Legend of Czech Photography", presented at the Museum of Photography and Modern Image Media in Jindřichův Hradec.

The photo archive and studio were taken over by Alexander's sons and heirs.

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