Jan Langhans (Fototorst)

Jan Langhans lived from 1851 to 1928, and is now, once again, among the best known figures in Czech photography. This book presents a selection of the studio photographs that made his name, culled from the “Celebrities Gallery” he began in 1890, a valuable record not only of famous Czechs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also of important visitors to the country who had their portraits made in one of his studios in Prague or elsewhere in Bohemia. Jan Langhans opens with a brief introduction by Zuzana Meisnerova-Wismerov·, the photographer’s great-granddaughter and the manager of the Langhans Gallery in Prague, and illustrates not only Langhans’s work but the height of portrait photography in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.