Biography
Koudelka was born in 1938 in the small Moravian town of Boskovice, Czechoslovakia. [2] He began photographing his family and the surroundings with a 6×6 Bakelite camera. He studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) in 1956, receiving a degree in engineering in 1961. [2] He staged his first photographic exhibition the same year. Later he worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and Bratislava.
Koudelka began taking commissions from theatre magazines, and regularly photographed stage productions at Prague's Theatre Behind the Gate on a Rolleiflex camera. [2] In 1967, he decided to give up his career in engineering for full-time work as a photographer. [2]
Between 1962 and 1971, Koudelka travelled throughout Czechoslovakia and rural Romania, Hungary, France and Spain photographing Romani people. [3] The Romani led a nomadic lifestyle and each summer Koudelka would travel for the project, "carrying a rucksack and a sleeping bag, sleeping in the open air, and living frugally". [3]
He had returned from photographing Romani people in Romania just two days before the Soviet invasion, in August 1968. [4] He witnessed and recorded the military forces of the Warsaw Pact as they invaded Prague and crushed reforms of the so-called Prague Spring. [4] Some of Koudelka's negatives were smuggled out of Prague to the Magnum Photos agency, and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine under the initials P. P. (Prague Photographer) for fear of reprisal to him and his family. [5]
Koudelka's pictures of the events became dramatic international symbols, and came to be "recognised as one of the most powerful photojournalistic essays of the 20th century". [4] In 1969 the "anonymous Czech photographer" was awarded the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Gold Medal for photographs requiring exceptional courage. Many of his photographs of these events were not seen until decades later. [4]
With Magnum to recommend him to the British authorities, Koudelka applied for a three-month working visa and fled to England in 1970, where he applied for political asylum and stayed for more than a decade. [2] In 1971 he joined Magnum as an Associate Member [2] and became a Full Member in 1974. He continued to wander around Europe with his camera and little else.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Koudelka sustained his work through numerous grants and awards, and continued to exhibit and publish major projects like Gypsies (1975) and Exiles (1988). [2] Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Observer in 2011, described Gypsies as "a classic of documentary photography". [3] Since 1986, he has worked with a panoramic camera and issued a compilation of these photographs in his book Chaos in 1999. Koudelka has had many other books of his work published, including in 2006 the retrospective volume Koudelka.
He and his work received support and acknowledgment from his friend the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. [2] He was also supported by the Czech art historian Anna Farova. [6]
In 1987, Koudelka became a French citizen, and was able to return to Czechoslovakia for the first time, in 1990. [2] He then produced Black Triangle, documenting the wasted landscape in the Podkrušnohoří region, the western tip of the Black Triangle's foothills of the Ore Mountains, located between Germany and the Czech Republic. [2] [7]
Koudelka lives in France and Prague and is continuing his work documenting the European landscape. [2] He is the father of two daughters, one who lives in England and the other in France, Lucina Hartley Koudelka, and of a son living in Italy, Nicola Koudelka.
Work
Koudelka's early work significantly shaped his later photography, and its emphasis on social and cultural rituals as well as death. He soon moved on to a more personal, in depth photographic study of the Gypsies of Slovakia, and later Romania. This work was exhibited in Prague in 1967. Throughout his career, Koudelka has been praised for his ability to capture the presence of the human spirit amidst dark landscapes. Desolation, waste, departure, despair and alienation are common themes in his work. His characters sometimes seem to come out of fairytales. Still, some see hope within his work – the endurance of human endeavor, in spite of its fragility. His later work focuses on the landscape removed of human subjects.
His most recent book Wall: Israeli and Palestinian Landscapes was published by Aperture Foundation in 2013. [1] This book is composed of panoramic landscapes that he made between 2008 and 2012, as his project for the photography collective This Place, organized by photographer Frédéric Brenner. [8] A documentary about Koudelka's work there, called Koudelka Shooting Holy Land, was released in 2015. [9]
