Josef Koudelka

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Josef Koudelka in the Folkwang Museum in Essen at the awarding of the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize by the German Society for Photography, November 7, 2015

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

Life

From 1961 to 1967 Koudelka trained as an aerospace engineer at the University of Prague . At the same time he started working as a reportage photographer , especially for the Czech theater magazine Divadlo. From 1965 to 1970 he was a theater photographer for the Prague Theater za Branou and a member of the Association of Czechoslovak Artists. In 1968 he made groundbreaking work during the Soviet invasion of the CSSR. In 1970 the company moved to London. He then worked as a freelance photographer at the Magnum photo agency from 1971 to 1980 . Koudelka has lived in Paris since 1980 , received French citizenship there and has been a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts since 2009 .

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Josef Koudelka, 1987
Josef Koudelka, 1987

In the second half of the 1960s, Koudelka created extensive cycles on the life of the Romance-speaking rural population. The Roma in Czechoslovakia were one of his main themes, whose lives he described from an internal perspective and family closeness.

In particular, however, his photographs during the Soviet occupation of the “brother state” CSSR in 1968, which marked the end of the Prague Spring , made him known to a wide public in the West as well. These photographs were first secretly smuggled out of the CSSR and passed on to Elliott Erwitt , then president of the Magnum photo agency . Koudelka's photographs were published by the agency in numerous magazines on the first anniversary of the 1969 invasion. To protect Koudelka and his family, the agency only gave the abbreviation “PP” for “Prague Photographer” as the author.

The Overseas Press Club awarded the “anonymous Czech photographer” the Robert Capa Gold Medal in the same year . But since the authorship would have been easy to discover by the Czechoslovak police, Koudelka decided to emigrate to Western Europe. 1970 traveled to Western Europe at Magnum's invitation to document the life of Roma groups and never returned to Prague. He settled in London and worked for Magnum. From 1980 Koudelka lived in Paris and became a French citizen in 1987. Since 1990 Josef Koudelka has been living in Prague again for a while.

Some of his pictures from Czechoslovakia from the 1960s are now regarded as symbols of the Soviet occupation and are considered milestones of artistic photojournalism of the 20th century. It was not until 1984 that he publicly acknowledged his authorship. In Czechoslovakia, his recordings were published for the first time in 1990 in a separate supplement to the magazine Respekt .

Koudelka's black-and-white photographs stand out due to their pronounced graphic abstraction and were formative for future generations of photojournalists . People often seem lost in the pictures, also because Koudelka was photographing them in the border areas of human life. At the same time, many of his works have a grotesque to humorous aspect. Despite their formal rigor, the pictures tell of a deep humanism.

Josef Koudelka thanks for the award of the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize of the German Society for Photography, November 7, 2015 - excerpt

In 2015 Koudelka was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize of the German Society for Photography .

Quote

“Buy yourself a pair of good shoes!” Was Koudelka's answer to a young photographer when he asked if he could give him a tip for his career.

Publications

(Selection)

  • Invasion Prague 68. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8296-0359-1 (preface and chronology by Jaroslav Cuhra, Jiři Hoppe and Jiři Suk; afterword by Irena Šorfová).
  • Josef Koudelka, Robert Delpire, Dominique Edde, Anna Farová: Koudelka: Retrospective. Edition Braus, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 978-3-89904-234-4 .
  • Josef Koudelka: Roma. Steidl, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-86930-388-8 .
  • Josef Koudelka: Exile. Delpire Éditeur, Paris 1988.
  • Josef Koudelka: Wall: Israeli and Palestinian Landscapes 2008-2012. Prestel, Munich 2013.

Exhibitions (selection)

Documentaries

  • Contacts , ARTE documentation series with 33 individual portraits of photographers. France 1988-2004. The Koudelka episode is directed by Robert Delpire
  • Koudelka: Shooting holy land . Directed by Gilad Baram , 2020

Web links

Commons : Josef Koudelka  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Josef Koudelka retrospective. Keep the anger. In: Tagesspiegel.de . July 17, 2017, accessed January 9, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c Photo Foundation Switzerland: Photo Foundation: photographer. Retrieved September 26, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Josef Koudelka receives the 2015 Dr. Erich Salomon Prize of the DGPh. Retrieved October 9, 2015.
  4. ^ Page of the museum on the exhibition. Retrieved April 27, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Koudelka, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French-Czech photographer
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Boskovice