| by Maurizio Berlincioni
Josef Koudelka was born in Moravia in 1938 and begun taking photographs when very young. At university he got to know the photographer and critic Jiri Jenicek who in 1961 encouraged him to exhibit his work in Prague's Semafor Theatre. Here he met the critic Anna Farova who became his friend and champion. In the same year he visited Italy.
He worked as an aeronatic engineer and travelled a great deal in Slovakia and Rumania photographing the life of Gipsies, religious festivals and avant-garde theatre productions.
Since 1967 after having received the Union of Artists' Prize in Czechoslovakia for the "innovative quality of his theatre photos" he gave himself up exclusively to photography, once again making for Rumania in search of "his world" of the Gipsies.
Returnkng to Prague in the period just before the invasion of the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact he photographed everything that happened on the streets of the capital.  | "Exils", book published
by Alinari |
A year later these photos were smuggled across the border and arrived in the USA where Elliot Erwitt, president of Magnum, made use of them in a short film for CBS; without mentioning his name Magnum distributed the piece to all the major international magazines while Koudelka, by now stateless, found asylum in England and began travelling around Europe in pursuit of his favoured subjects; in 1975 at New York's MOMA John Szarkowski presented the exhibition of Josef Koudelka and three years later his book Gitans: eventually he received the prestigious Nadar Prize.
In 1984, for the first time after 16 years of anonymity, London's Hayward Gallery exhibited the photos of the invasion of Prague with his name. In 1987 France, where Koudelka had been living for three years, granted him French citizenship and bestowed on him the National Grand Prix of photography. In 1988 two large exhibitions opened, one in Paris and the other in New York; in the same year Koudelka photographed with panoramic equipment the work on the Channel Tunnel.
With the same equipment he took pictures of the most devastated of Europe's landscapes ( The Black Triangle, the region of the metalliferous mountains stretching from the north of Bohemia to the south of Germany and Poland) and the centre of Beirut devastated by the war. In 1994 he followed the production of Angelopoulos' film The Gaze of Ulysses and took photos of all the Balkan countries where the film was set.
With his volume Exils, he won the ICP Award for the best photographic book of 1989. He has earned other acknowledgements such as the Hugo Erfurth Prize (1989), the Henri Cartier-Bresson International Grand Prize (1991) and Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation Prize for photography in 1992.
(© 1997 M.Berlincioni)
|
