Anna Fárová was a Czech art historian who specialized and catalogued Czech and Czechoslovak photographers, including František Drtikol and Josef Sudek.
Background
Anna Farova was born on June 1, 1928 in Paris, Ile-de-France, France to a Czech diplomat, Miloš Šafránek, and a French professor, Anne Moussu. She spent a part of her early childhood in Paris, the family moved to Plzeň, Czechoslovakia only in the middle of the 1930s.
Education
Following her studies at the French gymnasium in Prague Anna Farova continued studying art history and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague.
Career
In 1956, her father arranged a meeting with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. The meeting heavily influenced her career. She began working with Cartier-Bresson"s Magnum Photos agency and published a series of monographs in the Czechoslovakian publishing house Odeon. She held a number of photo exhibitions across Prague. However, the Communist era Czechoslovak government banned Fárová from working in the country after she became a signatory of the Charter 77 manifesto in the 1970s. Much of her work was published outside of Czechoslovakia during the 1980s, before the Velvet Revolution and fall of communism.
Anna Fárová died of a "serious illness" on 27 February 2010, at the age of 81.