1965 Silver gelatin print on glossy paper, 23.6x17.9 cm. Verso in pencil the author's signature (?), the title of the cycle and dating. Creased lower right corner and minor breaks in the paper. A Czech photographer and chemist. He used the pseudonym George North. He studied at the Czech Technical University and worked his whole life as a chemist in the field of dyes and aromatic substances. Nevertheless he had already begun devoting himself to photography during his studies and later became an unforgettable and original figure in the history of 20th-century Czech photography. It can be said that his work draws on surrealism and was also influenced by jazz and painting. He joined the programme of Group 42, in which his friend Kamil Lhoták and Jindřich Chalupecký, among others, were also active. Jiří Sever's domain was the creation of photographic book-objects. He made 46 of them in his lifetime. He named his first book Maskovaná Lucie a jiná setkání (Masked Lucie and Other Encounters, 1942). He devoted himself to photographing the outskirts of Prague, discovering the charm of a vanishing world, photographing quite ordinary things – street lighting, old, abandoned things that had outlived their use, mouldy tenement walls, dilapidated wooden fences, broken windows, shop windows of abandoned stores, torn posters etc. He sought and found poetry in the backdrop of the now long-vanished outskirts of the big city.