Josef Koudelka
Josef was born in 1938. As an engineering student, Koudelka first started photographing theatre in Prague as well as beginning a nine year project photographing Romani people which would take him to many locations in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. He graduated with an engineering degree in 1961. A year after becoming a full-time photographer in 1967, he witnessed and documented the Soviet invasion of Prague, and had to seek political asylum in 1970. His three main projects were all long term. Gypsies was published in 1975, Exiles in 1988, and Chaos in 1999.
When Koudelka photographed the Romani people, he would take off in the summer travelling light with a rucksack, sleeping rough and living frugally. On one of these trips he returned to Prague just before the Russian invasion, and was able to take some memorable photographs which were smuggled out of Cechoslovakia and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine. His pictures were included in one of the most powerful photojournalistic essays of the 20th century. The bulk of his photos of the Prague invasion were not published until 2008 when there was also a retrospective exhibition, 40 years after the event. During one week of the invasion Koudelka took over 6000 photos. Sean O’Hagan interviewed Koudelka at the time and recalls that he
‘… was shot at by a Russian soldier, and pursued through the crowds and into the backstreets around Wenceslas Square. In the short film that ends the exhibition, a young and scrawny Koudelka is seen perched on a Russian tank, filming a young Czech man waving a flag of resistance.’
Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 24 Aug 2008
Some of the people in the photographs turned up for the opening of the show, including a man whose arm Koudelka had positioned in the foreground of an empty Prague street, the watch on his wrist telling the time of the invasion. 'Forty years have gone by,' says Koudelka, 'and I do not remember them nor they me. You cannot rely on your memories - but you can rely on your pictures.'Koudelka’s book ‘The Gypsies’ is a classic of documentary photography. The project was photographed with a 25 mm wide-angled lens. As a lot of the photographs were taken indoors a wide-angled lens was almost essential in portraying a sense of place. Interestingly, when he left Czechoslovakia and became involved in other photography he no longer felt such a wide-angled lens was necessary. Street photographers often feel they need a wide angled lens to create intimacy and this book has consequently been of very great influence.
Koudelka captures the human spirit often seen in dark, brooding and unsentimental landscapes where despair and alienation are repeating themes within his photography. As an exile and roving spirit, his book called ‘Exiles’ captures troubling themes within the latter part of the 20th century. There are a couple of important lessons that can be learnt from his photography. The first I have alluded to already and that is that worthwhile projects take time, they owe their strength to finding a deep empathy with the project itself. The strength of a photograph and its place within the project often cannot be determined for some considerable time. Koudelka would often work with small prints and mount them on a wall to compare them over a period of time to make sure he selected the right ones. His approach shows us how important it is to consider our photographs over a long period and not to rush into print or complete a project too soon. The other major feature of his work is that he wanted to keep an open mind toward new work. He explains how he differed from some of other documentary photographers:
“Many photographers like Robert Frank and Cartier Bresson stopped photographing after 70 years because they felt that they had nothing more to say. In my case I still wake up and want to go and take photographs more than ever before. But I can see that a certain type of photography has come to an end because the subjects don’t exist anymore. From 1961 to 1966 I took pictures of Gypsies because I loved the music and culture. They were like me in many ways. Now there are less and less of these people so I can’t really say anything else about them.
What I can do is update projects like “The Black Triangle”, as that is about a specific landscape that doesn’t exist anymore. I can show how it was before and how it is now, so people realise what’s going on. That keeps me excited.”
So it has been that in the period post Gypsies and exile , in the years from the mid 1980s, Koudelka has been concerned to photograph in a panoramic format to illustrate the way the landscape has been destroyed. People are no longer the subject of his attention. He almost reinvented himself as an environmental photographer first in France and then in the wastelands of the ‘Black Triangle’. These photographs portray the industrial devastation that has been wreaking our planet. His Panoramic photos were published in ‘The Black Triangle’ (1994) and ‘Chaos’ (1999).
