By DEBORA MAZZA & AFRANIO CATANI

Considerations about the Czech photographer’s exhibition, on display in São Paulo

Josef Koudelka (1938) was born in a small town in the Moravian region, in the former Czechoslovakia. Graduated in engineering in 1961, he organized his first photographic exhibition that same year. He then worked as an aeronautical engineer until 1967, when he decided to abandon the profession and dedicate himself exclusively to photography.

Josef Koudelka had returned to Prague just two days ago, returning from Romania, where he had gone to capture images of the people Romans, when the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia took place. He photographed everything, recording the entry of the Warsaw Pact military forces.

In 1970 he obtained a three-year work visa and fled to England, where he sought political asylum and lived there for another decade. He joined the Magnun Photos and worked throughout Europe, having received several awards and grants, which allowed him to continue his activity. He became a French citizen in 1987 and returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1990. He currently lives in France and Prague, continuing to work.

The exhibition brings together three photographic series taken between the 1960s and 1980s. As stated in the IMS exhibition brochure, still working as an engineer, Josef Koudelka “started working for theaters in Prague and, above all, traveling to record the life of gypsy communities in their home country.” The themes of nomadism, freedom and independence that he found among the gypsies would end up gaining new meanings for the photographer “after the Soviet invasion that, in August 1968, put an end to the Prague Spring and the hope of democratic socialism”.

When he went into exile in Western Europe in 1970, Josef Koudelka, himself, “entrusted himself to a life without a fixed home, in the footsteps of gypsies, pilgrims, wanderers – in short, of forms of life averse to social control and dizzying modernity.”

Gypsies

“With the gypsies, everything was theater too. The difference is that no one had written the play, and there was no director either – there were only the actors. It was real, it was life…it was only up to me to learn how to react to it” (Josef Koudelka).

The photos in this series constitute classic records of world photography. They were made in 1962 and 1970, when Josef Koudelka visited numerous camps Romans in eastern Slovakia, but also in Bohemia, Moravia and Romania. He photographed gypsy life “as a kind of open-air theater”.

In 1967 he exhibited them for the first time and, in 1968, with the graphic artist Milan Koprivo, he edited them, but the book could not be published “due to the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia at the end of August 1968.” Only in 1975 did Koudelka and editor Robert Delpire manage to publish them in a publication in French and English. In 2011 the book was published in six languages, “in the way it had been originally conceived almost half a century earlier”.

Prague, 1968

“In these photos, it doesn’t matter who is Russian and who is Russian and who is Czech. What matters is who has a gun in hand and who doesn't. And, in truth, the one who is not is the strongest, even if this is not evident at first glance” (Josef Koudelka)

Josef Koudelka had never worked as a photojournalist before, but as soon as he learned, on the morning of August 21, 1968, of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by five Warsaw Pact armies, he began photographing everything that was happening in the streets. He did this for a week. Some photos were smuggled out of the country, specifically to the Magnum agency in New York, and ended up appearing in newspapers around the world.

To protect the photographer and his family, Magnum credited the photographs with only the letters PP (Prague Photographer, the 'Prague photographer'). Fearing reprisals, Josef Koudelka went into exile in 1970, as the country's secret police could identify the author of the photos. Only in 1984, after his father's death, did he assume authorship of all the images he recorded. Such photos were only published in Czechoslovakia in 1990.

British photographer Ian Berry (1934) had this to say about Josef Koudelka's action in Prague: “The only other photographer I saw was a complete derangement with old-school cameras hanging around his neck and a cardboard box hanging from his shoulder. . He advanced straight towards the Russians, climbed onto their tanks and photographed openly. The crowd supported him, intervening and surrounding the guy when the Russians tried to snatch his rolls of film. I didn’t know if that man was the bravest or the craziest of all.”

exiles

“Never stay in one place for too long… When you stop somewhere, things start to stick to you. When you go from one place to another, you are cleaning yourself” (Josef Koudelka)

From the moment he emigrated in 1971, Josef Koudelka gained complete freedom and, in order to be able to photograph quickly, he began to live modestly, constantly moving around Spain, France, Portugal, Ireland and Great Britain, becoming He is a nomadic photographer, like most of his subjects.

“Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he portrayed ways of life that were about to disappear, but also uninhabited spaces, animals lost in densely built areas, landscapes and still lifes. Working with visual metaphors, telling the story of a world in which human beings search in vain for their place.”

In 1988, he published the book exiles, which came out again, with minor modifications, in 1997 and 2014.

In Alessandra Monterastelli's article about the exhibition, the photographer stated that, as a young man, he wandered around several countries accompanied by a change of clothes and a camera, not staying in the same place for more than three weeks. “I knew it didn’t need much to work. Just some food and a good night's sleep. I learned to sleep anywhere and under any circumstances.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson warned him not to lose sight. Josef Koudelka responded that he was “born a visual person” and never exchanged his gaze for money and did not accept commissioned work. He also said he never told stories. “I wanted to take a single photo that told different stories to different people.”

In a conversation with Hervé Guibert (1955-1991), Josef Koudelka defined what he considered to be, perhaps, his greatest interest as a photography professional. The dialogue is as follows:

These traits you are looking for, would you know how to define them?

What I know is that I'm only interested in what's ending, what's disappearing, and not what's to come.

* Deborah Mazza é professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Faculty of Education at UNICAMP. Author, among other books, of Paulo Freire, culture and education: thinking in the shade of a mango tree (Unicamp Publisher).

*Afranio Catani is a senior professor at the Faculty of Education at USP and visiting professor at the Faculty of Education at UERJ (Duque de Caxias campus).

Reference

Josef Koudelka, photographs: gypsies, Prague 1968, exiles

Exhibition on display at Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in São Paulo until September 15, 2024.

REFERENCES

Alessandra Monterastelli. Josef Koudelka was a wandering artist who portrayed the violent invasion of Prague. “illustrated”, Folha de S. Paul, 05.06.2024.

KOUDELKA. Josef. Magnum Photos.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/josef-koudelka

KOUDELKA. Josef. Gypsies, Prague 1968, Exile. In Exhibition Brochure Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS), 2024, p. 1-20. Source available: https://ims.com.br/exposicao/josef-koudelka_ims-paulista/.

Miguel Del Castillo; Samuel Titan Jr. Koudelka: Gypsies, Prague 1968, Exiles. Brochure. São Paulo. Instituto Moreira Salles, 2024.

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