Josef Binko (Fototorst)

On top of his day job--he was co-owner of a tannery in the Bohemian-Moravian Uplands of Czechoslovakia--Josef Binko (1879-1960) made time to create one of the most important photography portfolios of his era. He is the only amateur photographer with thousands of negatives in Prague's Museum of Decorative Arts, the country's most serious photography collection, and the only Czech photographer continuously represented at the National Technical Museum, Prague: his darkroom is part of a permanent exhibition on the history of photographic technology. He is one of only two Czech photographers whose brome oil and gum bichromate prints from the period before the First World War are known to have survived in the hundreds. Binko, until recently little known, has now come to be understood as a major contributor to the early years of his media.