AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Photographs of the 1968 invasion of Prague, the Roma communities of Europe, and life in exile
- Works in
- Black and white; 35mm film for decades, then a panoramic format from 1986
- Camera
- A Rolleiflex for early theatre work; small 35mm cameras; panoramic cameras since 1986
- Also
- Magnum member since 1971 (full member 1974); Hasselblad Award 1992; French citizen since 1987
- Start with
- Gypsies (Aperture, 1975)
- Links
Josef Koudelka (born 1938) is a Czech-born photographer who has been a French citizen since 1987. He is known for his pictures of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague and for Gypsies, his long study of Roma life. A member of Magnum Photos since 1971, he now works mostly with a panoramic camera.
The story
In 1969 Josef Koudelka came to London with a Czech theatre group. There someone showed him The Sunday Times Magazine. Inside were his own photographs of the invasion of Prague. The credit said only “P. P.”, for Prague Photographer. “I could not tell anyone that they were my photographs,” he said. “It was a very strange feeling.”
Born in Boskovice, Moravia, in 1938, he had studied engineering in Prague and worked as an aeronautical engineer. He also photographed plays at the Theatre Behind the Gate. From 1962 he walked to Roma settlements in Czechoslovakia and later Romania, Hungary, France and Spain, with a rucksack and a sleeping bag. In 1967 he left engineering to photograph full time. One picture from Romania in 1968 shows a man crouching beside a white horse.
He came back from Romania two days before Warsaw Pact troops entered Czechoslovakia in August 1968. In about a week he made some ten thousand photographs. On 22 August, at noon, the city was on strike. From a building above the empty Wenceslas Square, a man beside him held out his arm with a wristwatch. Koudelka photographed the watch against the empty street. Later his negatives were smuggled out to Magnum.
But the fame of the pictures was also a danger. “From that moment, I was afraid to go back to Czechoslovakia,” he said. So Magnum wrote to the Czech Ministry of Culture about a grant for him to photograph Gypsies across Europe. In 1970 he stayed in England, asked for asylum and became stateless. In 1969 the Robert Capa Gold Medal went to an “unknown Czech photographer.”
Years on the road followed. He took no assignments and photographed only for himself. “For 17 years I never paid any rent,” he said. At night Roma families slept in their caravans, and he slept outside under the sky. “Even the Gypsies were sorry for me because they thought I was poorer than them.”
The pictures that had no name in 1969 were shown under his own name at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1984. In 1987 he became a French citizen, and in 1990 he went back to Czechoslovakia for the first time. Looking back, he did not describe exile only as something taken from him. “Every exile is a different, personal experience,” he said. “Myself, I wanted to see the world and photograph it.”
The work
- 1938Born in Boskovice, Moravia
- 1961Engineering degree; first exhibition, at the Semafor theatre in Prague
- 1967Leaves engineering to photograph full time
- 1968Photographs the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague
- 1970Leaves Czechoslovakia and asks for asylum in England
- 1974Becomes a full member of Magnum Photos
- 1975Gypsies is published; solo show at MoMA, New York
- 1987Becomes a French citizen
- 2020Ruins, 110 panoramas of Mediterranean sites, at the BnF in Paris
Lessons
Live close to your subject. For years he travelled among Roma communities with a rucksack and a sleeping bag, and often slept outside.
Work for yourself. For about fifteen years he accepted no assignments and photographed only for himself.
Keep editing old work. Gypsies first came out in 1975 with sixty photographs, and new editions followed in 2011 and 2019. He has said that in the future he will be travelling in his contact sheets.
Try this: choose one place you can visit again and again, like a market, a square or a field. Photograph it many times over a year, and in different weather. Koudelka went back to the same Mediterranean sites for more than thirty years for his series Ruins.
Gear
Koudelka rarely talks about camera models. These are the cameras and formats named in sources.
Bakelite 6x6 camera: as a boy he photographed his family and surroundings with a simple 6x6 camera made of Bakelite.
Twin-lens reflex camera: he used a Rolleiflex for his theatre photographs at the Theatre Behind the Gate in Prague.
35mm film camera: in Prague in 1968 the photographer Ian Berry saw him with “a couple of old-fashioned cameras on a string round his neck.” His archive holds about 30,000 contact sheets from 35mm film.
Panoramic camera: he began working in a panoramic format in 1986, while photographing the French landscape. One article names a Fuji 617 and a Leica S2 digital camera that Leica converted to a panoramic format.
Books
Gypsies (Aperture, 1975). Published with Robert Delpire, who brought it out in France as Gitans: la fin du voyage. The book has sixty black-and-white photographs made between 1962 and 1971 in Roma communities in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. The text is by the sociologist Will Guy, who studies Roma life. The same year the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave Koudelka a solo show. An expanded edition followed in 2011 and a small paperback in 2019, with an updated text by Guy. The best book to start with.
Exiles (Aperture, 2014, third edition). First published by Robert Delpire in 1988, with an introduction by the poet Czesław Miłosz. The pictures come mostly from the years Koudelka spent wandering across Europe and Great Britain after he left Czechoslovakia. People, animals and empty places appear in Ireland, France, Spain, Italy and beyond. This edition has 77 black-and-white photographs on 186 pages, including about a dozen new images and a new conversation with Robert Delpire. A good book for anyone interested in how a personal life can shape a body of work.
Invasion 68: Prague (Aperture, 2008). Made forty years after the invasion, with a Czech edition by Torst in Prague. It holds nearly 250 photographs from his archive, most of them published for the first time. Czech historians, among them Jaroslav Čuhra, Jiří Hoppe and Jiří Suk, wrote the introduction and a day-by-day chronology. The book was designed by Aleš Najbrt and runs to 296 pages. It is the fullest record of the week that changed his life.
Wall (Aperture, 2013). Black-and-white panoramas of the barrier between Israel and the West Bank, made from 2008 to 2012 for the group project This Place. The pictures show East Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Israeli settlements along the route. Each wide spread is one photograph. Captions and texts are by Ray Dolphin, who has written UN reports on the barrier. The book has 128 pages and shows his later landscape work at its strongest.
In his words
“To be in exile is simply to have left one's country and to be unable to return.”
“What I needed most was to travel so that I could take photographs.”
“I will be travelling in my contact sheets.”
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