Sonja Bullaty

Sonja Vera Bullaty (October 17, 1923, Prague, Czechoslovakia – October 5, 2000, New York) was a Czech-American photographer. Bullaty is known for her "lyrical composition" and strong use of color during her fifty-year collaboration with her husband, Angelo Lomeo. Bullaty and Lomeo's photographs appeared in LIFE, Time and Audubon magazines and journal. They have both exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography,

Biography Bullaty was born in Prague to a Jewish banking family. Since Bullaty had been forced to leave school at the time, the camera was a "consolation gift." and then later taken to Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen concentration camps. During a death march near Dresden, she and a friend successfully hid in a barn and were able to escape and return to Prague. Sudek's work often focused on the Czech landscape and windows, such as in the series The Windows of My Studio (1940-1954). Bullaty also photographed windows, but unlike Sudek, who photographed his own windows looking out, Bullaty photographed windows looking into buildings. Bullaty published a book, Sudek (1978), about her mentor, and it was the first publication of his work in the West.

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.

Bullaty found work with a photographer on her third day in New York. In 1971, she helped mount an exhibition of Sudek's work in New York. The couple were the first to receive the Olivia Ladd Gilliam Award from the Orion Society. She also captured the effects of climate and seasons in her landscape work. 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."

Bullaty died from cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on October 5, 2000.