After being apprenticed to a bookbinder (1911-13) Sudek was inducted into the army (1915). While at the Italian front he was seriously injured and later suffered the loss of his right arm. Because of this handicap he could no longer be a bookbinder, so he turned to photography. In 1920 Sudek joined the Club for Amateur Photographers in Prague, and in 1924, with Jaromire Funke and other avant-garde photographers, he founded the Czech Photographic Society. He was awarded the Order of Work by the Czech government in 1966 and received the title Artist of Merit in 1961, the first photographer so honored by the Czech government.

Known for lyrical images that show a fine eye for life's intimate details, Sudek once explained that "everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings....To capture some of this - I suppose that's lyricism."