Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka – Early motifs: Theater, the Roma people and the Russian invasion of Prague

Josef Koudelka was born in Boskovice in Czechoslovakia on 10 January 1938. He produced his first photographs in the 1950s as a young student in Prague at the technical university but despite his budding passion for photo art, he initially started a career as an aeronautical engineer. He picked up the camera in his spare time, however, photographing Prague theatre productions and documenting the life of the Roma people in Czechoslovakia. When Russian tank troops entered Prague in 1968 and cut a violent end to the Prague Spring, Josef Koudelka also pressed the trigger of his camera. His sensational photo reportage was honoured the following year by the American Overseas Press Club with the Robert Capa Gold Medal; however, due to the precarious political situation and to protect his family, he was not mentioned by name as photographer. Only sixteen years later, after the death of his father, could Josef Koudelka officially profess to the important photographs. However, he was already considered an ostracised stateless person as he had applied for asylum in England and evaded the conflicts in his home country. 

Empathetic photographs of border crossers and the lost

Josef Koudelka worked in London for the renowned photo agency Magnum and turned once again to his earlier interest, the Roma people, whose life in Western Europe he had taken as subject matter for many series of photographs. As a displaced person without a homeland himself, he felt deeply drawn to the wandering nomads in an indefinably related way. Koudelka published one part of these works in 1975 in his book Gypsies. It was the first of over a dozen successful photo books which he published over the next few years. The loss which Josef Koudelka experienced himself in life is mirrored in nearly all of his pictures. The people he shows are never specific and approachable, but always withdrawn from the viewer, even when the camera gets very close. This is also because Kodelka is a border crosser who collects his motifs where normality has long since ceased, but always treating them with a great deal of respect. 

An unpretentious, multi-award-winning artist

Josef Koudelka, the chronicler of serious themes, displays time and again a subtle sense of humour. It sometimes flashes in his pictures which often have a hidden cheerfulness in their details. But the artist also shows himself to be unpretentious in dealing with his admirers: Buy yourself a good pair of shoes, was his dry advice to a young photographer who was hoping for some good tips for his own career. Koudelka himself had needed these shoes when he explored remote areas with a firm step and camera at the ready. He has received awards and honours for his photo art such as Prix Nadar (1978), the Grand Prix Cartier-Bresson (1991) and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award for photography (1992) as well as the Dr. Erich Salomon Preis from the German Society for Photography in 2015. The artist has held French citizenship since 1980 and from the 1990s has finally found well-deserved recognition in his original homeland of the Czech Republic.