This photographer has traveled almost non-stop for the majority of his life on next to nothing besides his camera, film, and the clothes on his back, lived in exile for 20 years with no nation to call his own, and used his experiences to shape his photographic voice to reflect on and make connections with those living through similar conditions. He's created incredibly unique panoramas of the impact humanity has had on nature throughout time immemorial. He is a member of Magnum with over 60 years of photography experience that continues to push the photographic medium through well thought out projects and long term endeavors.
Becoming an Exile
Josef Koudelka found that travel was the most essential part of following through with what he wanted to accomplish with his photography. He's been doing so for over 50 years claiming "I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.” To do this, he lived on next to nothing "I didn’t need much: a good sleeping bag and some clothes – one pair of shoes, two pairs of socks and a pair of trousers for one year. One jacket and two shirts lasted me for three years.” It is through his travel that he found connection with the people he chose to photograph as they have all, in some way, including himself, been in exile together. “To be in exile is simply to have left one’s country and to be unable to return. Every exile is a different, personal experience."
The photos that forced his own life of exile upon him were of the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968. He photographed this event not as a journalist, but as a Czech who wanted to document a moment of duress being brought upon his fellow citizens by the USSR. Koudelka speaks of this event as a once in a life time experience that he had never photographed anything similar to before or after. "I just took photographs but didn’t develop them. There wasn’t time for that. It was only later that I processed everything. I left behind some photographs with my friend Anna Fárová."
Through Anna these negatives made their way into the hands of Elliot Erwitt who was the president of Magnum at the time. Magnum then developed, printed, and distributed the photos world wide as a part of publications that would be released on the one year anniversary of the invasion to show what had happened in Czechoslovakia. At the time, they were published under the name "P.P." standing for Prague Photographer as a way of protecting Koudelka's identity, but members of Magnum advised him that he should not return to Prague. Koudelka's growing fear that he would face persecution in his home country after the release of these photos led him to seek out political asylum in London in 1970.
The Exile of Others
These photos eventually allowed Koudelka to become a member of Magnum. Joining Magnum gave Koudelka access to photographers and friends around the world that could help him with places to stay and access to local communities. Many times the communities that he engaged with were made up of people living in exile similar to himself. He took on the endevour of photographing these communities without any goal of making money or working on paid assignments, but in pursuit of personal projects to learn about these people and help others experience their lives through his lens. To further follow his goals in a way he saw fit he says "I tried to avoid owning anything. I didn’t pay rent. I realized that I could travel on the money that I would have spent on a flat. What I needed most was to travel so that I could take photographs…I knew that I didn’t need much to function – some food and a good night’s sleep. I learned to sleep anywhere and under any circumstances.”
One of the groups he chose to photograph, before his exile had begun and later during it, were those of Roma communities throughout Europe in his project titled Gypsies. Koudelka's minimalist lifestyle made it easy for him to pack up and move between groups of these communities to make images that showed how they lived out their day-to-day lives. The photographs were made over nearly a decade from 1962 to 1971 all over Europe in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France, and Spain. During this period in communist controlled areas, Roma people were forced to assimilate into the culture through laws that came with prison time for anyone who was attempting to carry on in their tradition of nomadic lifestyles living on the road. According to Jan Ort a Romani Studies Scholar: “Romani people, in this story, seem to be defenseless victims who fought for ethnocultural self-determination just during the short time in which their organization, the union, was working in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, the postwar history of the Roma can also be seen as the story of maintaining their cultural values even under conditions, politically, which were not always receptive to them.” Koudelka's immersion into these groups is what allowed him to create a true representation of all that they were going through.
Technique = Unique Style
During this time early in his career, Koudelka also developed what has become his signature style. He is often sighted as having unique shadows and contrast in his images. This is how he describes his methods for getting his photos to look this way which is was a byproduct of needing to heavily push his film which leads to increased contrast and grain. He needed to push his film in order to bring up the exposure, given the film and equipment he was using and the conditions he was using it in with relatively quick shutter speeds. "When I was in Prague, I photographed the Gypsies with [...] a 25-millimeter [...] f4 lens. I shot inside, mostly at a 30th of a second or less. I bulk-loaded this East German 400 ASA movie film – and pushed it as far as it could go in a hot developer. Sometimes I left it in overnight. Sometimes to 3200 ASA."
Panoramic Visions
After photographing the Gypsies project with a wind-angle lens he stated "When I understood that I don’t need any more wide-angle lens photos – that on the contrary there’s a repetition coming — I bought two Leicas and started to use a 35-millimeter lens and a 50-millimeter lens. I knew that the techniques will change the vision — if you change the technique" In the spirit of continuing changes in vision and technique, Koudelka chose to move to panoramic format in 1986 when he worked for a French organization whose goal was to "represent the French landscape of the 1980s." Koudelka chose to photograph these landscapes in a way that showed them in contrast to the industry that sat upon them. "I was always trying to find beauty in places where others don’t see it. Without taking up the environmental cause, I am pleased if my photographs draw attention to their violation." That beauty is found in his images that contain the factories, roads, powerlines, and power plants that dot spanning plots of French earth. No matter how much Koudelka may not have intentionally wanted to take up an environmental cause the impacts industry had on these spaces is impossible to avoid taking note of when looking at these frames.
Through panoramic photography Koudelka came away with hauntingly beautiful images that were significantly different from any of the work he had previously made. His vision and techniques shifted the subject matter he chose to photograph from people to places. Everything he photographed in for the French landscapes project was leaned into more heavily with future projects including that of the Black Triangle region. This area lies between Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic and the project marked the first time Koudelka returned too Czechoslovakia after seeking political asylum. His photos of this region show the impact humans have had on the environment through open-cast mining. These effects include the destruction of over 50% of this region's coniferous forests between 1972 and 1989.
In 1999, Koudelka's photobook titled Chaos was released. It continues his panoramic visions by displaying 108 images that he created over the course of 12 years. They are both horizontal and vertical panoramas that take the medium to another level since the format typically includes faroff landscapes and the serene. Thus the name Chaos is fitting. The images include texture shots of walls, toppled roman columns, and rundown soviet streets.
Later in his career when Koudelka switched from film to digital Leica created a one-of-a-kind panoramic version of the S2 for him. He decided to move to digital, because of the cost of film for panoramics and the impossibilities that Koudelka claims came with developing his choice of 220 film (a film with the same width as 120, but twice as much film and no backing paper that has mostly fallen out of use). “When Leica made a digital panoramic camera for me — which gave me a similar result to the analogue camera I was using before — I was very happy, because now I could pick up my camera, call my friends which I have all over the world, and just say, Can I sleep in your house?” “I no longer need to carry with me 35 kilograms, only about 10 kilograms, and I don’t need to go through the X-ray machines which I really dislike. So the digital camera makes it easier, and also more interesting.”
Shooting Holy Land
Shooting Holy Land is both a photobook and a documentary Koudelka worked on during his 70s. For this project, Koudelka along with photographers Stephen Shore, Fazal Sheikh, and Thomas Struth among others were invited to create projects in Israel and Palestine that presented their own viewpoint on the complicated region. At first, Koudelka did not accept the invitation to join this project, because he felt the region had not impacted him significantly. Once he began to compare and contrast "The Wall" that separates the contested area he saw the similarities that existed between it and the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union that he experienced much earlier in his life in Czechoslovakia.
He drew upon his experiences in Czechoslovakia, but also, upon the experiences he had photographing the world's landscapes “The landscape there is so beautiful, and when I saw the Wall, I felt very sad…in the same way that there is crime against humanity, there can also be crime against the landscape”. This recognition caused him to repeatedly come back to the area over a period of nearly five years from 2008 to 2012, so that he could see it at different times of the year under different weather conditions. The images taken there and the documentary created by Gilad Baram both offer a strange calm somewhat similar to images created in France and The Black Triangle before. While you know this is an area of tension and conflict it's odd that a feeling of peace comes when looking at this work.
Ruins
Ruins was released in 2020. This book embodies thirty years of work from Koudelka's trips to nearly 200 archeological sites around the Mediterranean from Tunisia, Libya, and Spain to Greece, Italy, Turkey, and Syria. Much like his other work captured after a certain point, these images are all black and white panoramic photos that converse with the convergence of transformation and destruction brought on by humans and nature that we can interface with during our lifetimes, but will long outlast our existence. The bleak images force these thoughts on the viewers as they are not majestic visions of the long lost beauty often associated with antiquity, but a tragic look at what remains left behind and forgotten.
