Adrian Searle: Out of Sight

Whether or not we think of ourselves as such, almost everyone today is an amateur photographer. The point is not to take one great or circumstantially telling individual photograph - such accidents happen all the time - but to create something more. If Josef Sudek had taken only one intriguing photograph of a tree, seen through the window of his Prague studio, it wouldn't detain us for long. That Sudek went on taking photograph after photograph of the same subject deserves our attention rather more. Often, the tree is more or less obscured. Rain runs down the window, the glass is fogged by condensation or ice. Serial photographs of the same view, the same tree with the brickwork and railings beyond, and beyond that a street on whose far side are more buildings, more windows. It is relentless. Perhaps the tree itself matters less than the fall of the light in the ramshackle room where the photographer spends his days. For a long time, Sudek was best known for his panoramic views of Prague, but his real panorama was this studio, the desk with its avalanches of paper, a landscape on the sill with broken eggshells. The mess of inconsequential things and the narrow view out of the window reared up at him as though all of it had urgent significance.