Josef Koudelka

(French citizen, b. Czechoslovakia 1938)

Spain, 1972 (Village Idiot), 1972/1980

Josef Koudelka made his photograph Spain, 1972 (Village Idiot) at the beginning of his career with the Magnum photo agency and only a couple of years into his exile from his native Czechoslovakia. Characteristic of Koudelka’s work, it is a black and white picture shot on the street and within the photo-documentary/photo-journalistic tradition. It was published in 1988’s Exiles, and the isolation of the figure in the foreground from his fellows may be suggestive of Koudelka’s feelings regarding his own separation from his countrymen. Exiles won Photographic Book of the Year by Maine Photographic Workshops and also the International Center of Photography Publication Award for an Outstanding Photographic Book.

Josef Koudelka was born on January 10, 1938 in Moravia, Czechoslovakia. He started photographing his family and surroundings as a teenager, c. 1952, then trained at the Technical University of Prague and worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and Bratislava from 1961 to 1967. He became a member of the Union of Czechoslovak Artists in 1965, pursuing photography full-time as of 1967. His 1968 documentary of gypsy communities in Romania and the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact armies (a project so politically volatile it was published without Koudelka’s name, saying only that it was authored “by a Czech photographer”) won him the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal Award a year later. Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970 and was awarded asylum in England. There, Elliott Erwitt introduced him to Magnum Photos, which made Koudelka an associate in 1971 and a full member in 1974. The following year, John Szarkowski organized a solo exhibition of Koudelka’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Major exhibitions of his work have also been held at Hayward Gallery, London; Centre National de la Photographie, Paris; and International Center of Photograpy, New York. Koudelka was naturalized as a French citizen in 1987, and was first able to return to Czechoslovakia in 1990. He is the winner of the Prix Nadar (1978); an official invitation from the French Ministry to document urban and rural landscape in France (1986); Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989); Grand Prix Cartier-Bresson (1991); Erna & Victor Hasselblad Foundation Photography Prize (1992); and Centenary Medal by the Royal Photographic Society (1998).

— Kendra Greene

Koudelka, Josef. Chaos. Paris: Phaidon Press, 1999.

Koudelka, Josef. Exiles. New York: Aperture, 1988.

Koudelka, Josef. Gypsies. Göteborg, Sweden: Hasselblad Center, 1992.

Koudelka, Josef. Josef Koudelka. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002.

http://www.magnumphotos.com/