Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka ( born January 10, 1938 in Boskovice, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech photographer.

Life

He received training as an aerospace engineer at the University of Prague from 1961 to 1967. Parallel to this, he served since the 1960s as a reportage photographer in particular for the theater magazine " Divadlo ". From 1965 to 1970 he was a theater photographer for the Prague Theatre za Branou, and member of the Association of Czechoslovak Artists. In 1968 he had made pioneering contributions during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1970 he moved to London. After that he was from 1971-1980 a freelance photographer at the photo agency Magnum. Koudelka has lived in Paris since 1980.

Work

Koudelka created in the 1960s extended cycles over the life of the Romanian rural population. The Roma were there one of his main subjects whose lives he portrayed from an inner perspective and family close out.

In particular, but his photographs during the Soviet occupation of " brother nation " CSSR 1968, which marked the end of the Prague Spring, made ​​him known in the West as the general public. These photographs were originally secretly from Czechoslovakia to Elliott Erwitt, the then President of the Magnum photo agency, forwarded and published for the first anniversary of the invasion in 1969 by the Agency in numerous magazines. To protect Koudelka and his family, the agency wrote his images an "unknown photographer " to. The Overseas Press Club gave the " anonymous Czech photographer " in the same year his Robert Capa Gold Medal. Since the authorship would have been but easy to detect by the Czechoslovak police, to Koudelka decided in 1970 by a trip to Western Europe, where he was to document the life of the Roma at the invitation of Magnum not to return to his homeland. Some of these images are now regarded as symbols of the occupation and regarded as milestones of artistic photojournalism of the 20th century. It was not until 1984, he publicly came to his authorship. In Czechoslovakia, his photographs were published in respect of a separate supplement of the magazine for the first time in 1990.

Koudelka's black and white photographs stand out with distinctive graphic abstraction and were formative for future generations of photojournalists. People act on the images often lost, because Koudelka photographed them just in the border areas of human life. At the same time many of his works have a grotesque and humorous aspect. The images bear witness despite their formal rigor of a deep humanism.

Quote

" Buy yourself some good shoes! " Was the reply Koudelka to a young photographer if he could give a tip for his career to him.

Publications

  • Invasion Prague 68 Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8296-0359-1 ( preface and chronology of Cuhra Jaroslav, Jiri Hoppe and Jiří Suk; afterword by Irena Šorfová )
  • Josef Koudelka, Robert Delpire, Dominique Edde, Anna Farova: Koudelka: Retrospective. Edition Braus, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 978-3-89904-234-4.
  • Josef Koudelka: "Roma", published by Steidl, ISBN 978-3-86930-388-8
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