Anna Fárová (June 1, 1928 - February 27, 2010) was a Czech art historian who specialized and catalogued Czech and Czechoslovakian photographers, including Frantisek Drtikol and Josef Sudek.[1] She was one of the pioneers of writing on history of photography. Her publishing activities helped to establish photography as an art discipline within the country.
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Fárová was born in 1928 in Paris, France, to a Czech diplomat, Miloš Šafránek, and a French professor, Anne Moussu.[2] She spent a part of her early childhood in Paris, the family moved to Plzeň, Czechoslovakia only in the middle of the 1930s.[3] Following her studies at the French gymnasium in Prague she continued studying art history and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague.[4][5] In 1952, she married Czech artist Libor Fára.[6] In 1956, her father arranged a meeting with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.[1][7] The meeting heavily influenced her career.[1] She began working with Cartier-Bresson's Magnum Photos agency and published a series of monographs in the Czech publishing house Odeon.[1]
She held a number of photo exhibitions across Prague. However, the Communist era Czechoslovakian government banned Fárová from working in the country after she became a signatory of the Charter 77 manifesto in the 1970s.[1] Much of her work was published outside of Czechoslovakia during the 1980s, before the Velvet Revolution and fall of communism.[1]
Anna Fárová died of a "serious illness" on February 27, 2010, at the age of 81.[1][2]