Sonja Bullaty

Bullaty was born in Prague to a Jewish banking family.[1] Her family gave her a camera when she turned fourteen.[4] Since Bullaty had been forced to leave school at the time, the camera was a "consolation gift."[1] When Bullaty was eighteen, she was deported by the Nazis to Poland, where she was kept in the Lodz ghetto,[5] and then later taken to Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen concentration camps.[6] During a death march near Dresden, she and a friend successfully hid in a barn and were able to escape and return to Prague.[1] When she got back to her home city, she discovered that no one else in her family had survived the Holocaust.[1]

Bullaty, "her head shaved," saw and answered an advertisement to be the helper to Czech photographer, Josef Sudek.[7][6] As his assistant, she mixed chemicals for the darkroom, organized his negatives and learned from his sense of composition.[1] Sudek called her his "apprentice-martyr."[8] Sudek's work often focused on the Czech landscape and windows, such as in the series The Windows of My Studio (1940-1954).[9] Bullaty also photographed windows, but unlike Sudek, who photographed his own windows looking out, Bullaty photographed windows looking into buildings.[10] Bullaty published a book, Sudek (1978), about her mentor, and it was the first publication of his work in the West.[1][11]

A "distant relative" of Bullaty found her name on a Holocaust survivor's list and invited her to stay in New York in 1947, paying the boat fair from Europe for Bullaty.[1] Bullaty quit working for Sudek, but they remained friends, exchanging letters over the years.[7] Many of his letters to her were written on the backs of his photographs.[12]

Bullaty found work with a photographer on her third day in New York.[13] Also in 1947, she met Angelo Lomeo.[6] They were brought together when she was inquiring about a darkroom in a building he managed.[1] Lomeo was intrigued by Bullaty's accent and went to see her.[13] They started photographing together a year later, traveling and sharing resources; during their time together, they became close.[13] Bullaty and Lomeo were married in 1951.[1] Later, when she was married, she and her husband would visit Sudek and bring him photography supplies.[12] They visited him in Czechoslovakia "almost yearly."[14] In 1971, she helped mount an exhibition of Sudek's work in New York.[8]

As photographers, Bullaty and Lomeo started using studio cameras, but eventually changed to working on location with 35-mm SLR cameras.[10] They began their career photographing artwork for museums and galleries.[1] In addition, much of their work was originally in black and white, but they switched to color in 1970.[1] Lomeo and Bullaty had their first photographic assignment in 1948, located in the American South.[4] While photographing, Bullaty was grabbed by a Ku Klux Klansman and "pretended to be merely a tourist."[4] Bullaty and Lomeo worked together on assignments all over the world.[10] One series that Bullaty and Lomeo worked together on included windows from around the world and was featured in Popular Photography magazine.[15] LIFE magazine featured their photos of Yugoslavian peasant-painters and their art in 1964.[16] The couple were the first to receive the Olivia Ladd Gilliam Award from the Orion Society.[3]

Despite working together, Bullaty had her own personal vision: she was intrigued by "Kafkaesque shadows she remembers from her childhood."[13] She also captured the effects of climate and seasons in her landscape work.[17] Bullaty said, "I have often felt that the reason I celebrate life and beauty is precisely because I have seen so much pain and ugliness."[18]

Bullaty died from cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on October 5, 2000.[6] In 2001, Bullaty and Lomeo had 72 photographs featured in The World Trade Center Remembered.[19]

• Official site of Bullaty and Lomeo (archived)