A documentary and landscape photographer, Josef Koudelka first came to international prominence as the anonymous Czech photographer who documented the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Already known as a photographer of gypsies and theatre life at the time of the Russian military intervention, Koudelka went into political exile. A wanderer who cherished his solitary independence, he became a specialist in bleak photographs of outcasts like himself. Much of his work depicts disappearing ways of life and such sore points of contemporary life as environmental destruction.
Koudelka was born in 1938 in the tiny village of Boskovice in the Moravian province of Czechoslovakia.
Introduced to photography as a teenager by a friend of his father’s, Koudelka began photographing his family and surroundings with a 6×6 Bakelite (plastic) camera. In 1961 he graduated from the Technical University of Prague with a degree in aeronautical engineering and acquired an old Rolleiflex.
Koudelka then embarked on a career as an engineer in Prague and Bratislava, at the same time as developing his photographic career.
Koudelka credits the Czech photographer and critic Jiri Jenícek with encouraging him to organise his first exhibition in 1961. It was at this exhibition that Koudelka met the Czech photography critic and curator Anna Fárová, who became his friend and collaborator. During his military service in Bratislava, Koudelka met the Roma poet Desider Banga and began photographing the Roma with one of the first wide-angle lenses to arrive in Czechoslovakia. This East German lens, with a focal length of 25mm, allowed Koudelka to work in confined spaces and achieve a full depth of field. In the 1960s, the Roma were subject to forced assimilation within the Czech state. Although Koudelka found it difficult to take these photographs, he found inspiration in the music played in their settlements and in the support of the Roma themselves.
By chance, Koudelka also became involved with Czech theatre. In 1961, he began photographing performances on a freelance basis for the magazine Divadlo (Theatre). The first performance he photographed was Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage, and he continued to work for Divadlo until he left Czechoslovakia. He later explained why he stopped working in the theatre: “By [photographing theatre] in the same way I photograph real life, I learned to see the world as theatre. Photographing the theatre of the world interests me more […] With the gypsies, it was also theatre. The difference was that the play was not written and there was no director – there were only actors […] It was the theatre of life […] All I had to know was how to react”.
In 1968, Alexander Dubcek, the new leader of Czechoslovakia, initiated a reform programme to create ”communism with a human face”. The resulting freedom of speech and the press, freedom to travel abroad and a relaxation of secret police activities led to a period of euphoria known as the Prague Spring. Encouraged by Dubcek’s actions, many Czechs called for far-reaching reforms, including neutrality and withdrawal from the Soviet bloc. To prevent the reforms from spreading, the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Koudelka photographed the invasion. His pictures were smuggled out of the country with the help of Anna Fárová and published under the initials P.P. (Prague photographer) to spare his family any possible reprisals. The highly dramatic images of Russian tanks rolling into Prague and the Czech resistance became international symbols and won the ‘anonymous Czech photographer’ the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club. The photographs were not published under Koudelka’s name until 1984, after his father’s death.
Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970 on a three-month exit visa to photograph gypsies in the West.
He did not return when the visa expired and became stateless. In the same year he was granted political asylum in England. Introduced to Magnum Photos by Elliot Erwitt, Koudelka became an associate in 1971 and a full member in 1974. Despite numerous offers of work, Koudelka refused most commissions.
Always on the move, he preferred to wander around Europe in search of images of a world he felt was rapidly disappearing.
In 1986, Koudelka began working with a Linhof panoramic camera. He had long been interested in the wide format for portraying cities and landscapes. Even his early work includes attempts to achieve a panoramic view, either horizontally or vertically cropped from originally square negatives. Koudelka used panorama to photograph the changes brought about by the construction of the Channel Tunnel in France in 1988, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988-1991 and the war in Beirut, Lebanon in 1991.
This new camera also enabled Koudelka to make a series of apocalyptic photographs of the catastrophic state of the countryside. Having become a French citizen in 1987, he was able to return to what is now the Czech Republic for the first time in 1990. This visit led to Black Triangle, a study of the landscape of his homeland, ravaged by industrialisation and environmental disasters. Monumental, painterly compositions of exquisitely balanced and expressively provocative panoramic shots show how oversized technological instruments have transformed the land into a ravaged and unkempt stage devoid of human presence.
Koudelka has received major awards, including a grant from the British Arts Council to document the disappearance of Roma life in England (1976). He also received an official invitation from the French Ministry to document urban and rural landscapes in France (1986). The grants sustained him through long-term projects in black and white, which led to the publication of several books.
His first book, Gypsies, was published by Aperture in 1975, followed by Exiles (1988), Chaos (1999), Invasion 68: Prague (2008), Wall (2013) and most recently Ruins (2020).
Koudelka has won major awards including the Prix Nadar (1978), Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989), Grand Prix Cartier-Bresson (1991) and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1992).
His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Decorative Arts and the National Gallery, Prague. In 2012, he was appointed Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.
Major exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam; the Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
