Jan Saudek. My Country in Summertime.

A photograph with a long title

In 1975 the Czech photographer Jan Saudek printed a gelatin silver photograph and gave it a title far longer than photography usually allows: My Country in Summertime, followed by a sentence naming two smells. Hot railroad tracks. And the warm scent of hay.

According to the Art Institute of Chicago, the image measures about 26.8 by 35.1 cm, horizontal, mounted on a larger board. The museum acquired it through the Charles and Ruth Levy Foundation Fund.

The title has two parts. The first is a place and a season: my country in summer. The second is two smells. No person's name, no village, no exact date. Photographs are usually named for what is seen. Saudek named this one for what is smelled.

This essay does not describe in detail what lies inside the frame. What Penta wants to look at is the relation between image and words: a silent photograph, and a title that carries the heat, the humidity and the smell of a noon.

Saudek in Prague

Jan Saudek was born in Prague in 1935. He studied industrial photography there from 1950 to 1952, then worked various jobs to live, while photographing privately.

In 1963 a friend lent him The Family of Man, the book of the famous photography exhibition. It moved him deeply. From then on he wanted to make pictures about the human condition, and that same year he began to exhibit.

In 1969 he travelled to the United States for an exhibition in Indiana. The trip led him to Hugh Edwards, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, who encouraged him to keep going. His link with Chicago began there.

From the 1970s Saudek made many staged photographs in a cellar with a crumbling wall, which became his best known backdrop. But this 1975 print, through its title, faces outward: toward a season, a stretch of land, a railway line.

In 1975 Czechoslovakia was under communist rule, and travel abroad was restricted. In that setting, the words My Country are not a small detail. They are a way of naming where one belongs.

Two smells of one summer

The smell of hot railroad tracks is very specific. Steel in the sun, grease, and wooden sleepers usually soaked in tar oil against rot. In the heat, that oil rises. Anyone who has walked along a track at midday in summer knows it: sharp, heavy, a little smoky.

Hay sits at the other end. Grass is cut, left to lie, slowly loses its water and gives off a sweet, warm smell. Much of that sweetness comes from coumarin, a compound present in many grasses and released as they dry.

Side by side, the two smells make a small picture of the mid twentieth century countryside. Machines and fields. A railway running through meadows. A summer made of both iron and grass. Years later, another artist would set the smell of old wood beside that of steel to ask about home. Saudek needed only a line of text.

The black and white print cannot show the yellow of the hay or the heat of the steel. It has only greys. The title fills that gap. Standing before the photograph, the viewer almost cannot help adding a smell they already know.

That is why the photograph stays with us. Saudek shows something photography seldom admits: an image is not enough to hold a place. Memory of home often passes through the nose before it passes through the eye.