Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka was born in 1938 in Boskovice, Moravia, town of about 10,000 inhabitants. He began photographing his family and the surroundings with a 6 x 6 Bakelite camera. In 1961, he earned a degree from the Czech Technical University in Prague (CVUT), staging his first photographic exhibition the same year. Later he worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and Bratislava.

He began taking commissions from theatre magazines, and regularly photographed stage productions at Prague's Theatre Behind the Gate on an old Rolleiflex camera. In 1967, Koudelka decided to give up his career in engineering for full-time work as a photographer.

He had returned from a project photographing gypsies in Romania just two days before the Soviet invasion, in August 1968. He witnessed and recorded the military forces of the Warsaw Pact as they invaded Prague and crushed the Czech reforms. Koudelka's negatives were smuggled out of Prague into the hands of the Magnum agency, and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine under the initials P. P. (Prague Photographer) for fear of reprisal to him and his family.

His pictures of the events became dramatic international symbols. In 1969 the "anonymous Czech photographer" was awarded the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Gold Medal for photographs requiring exceptional courage.

With Magnum to recommend him to the British authorities, he applied for a three-month working visa and fled to England in 1970, where he applied for political asylum, in 1971 joined Magnum Photos and stayed for more than a decade. A nomad at heart, he continued to wander around Europe with his camera and little else.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Koudelka sustained his work through numerous grants and awards, and continued to exhibit and publish major projects like Gypsies (1975, his first book) and Exiles (1988, his second). Since 1986, he has worked with a panoramic camera and issued a compilation of these photographs in his book Chaos in 1999. Koudelka has had more than a dozen books of his work published, including most recently in 2006 the retrospective volume Koudelka.

He has won significant awards such as the Prix Nadar (1978), a Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989), a Grand Prix Cartier-Bresson (1991), and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1992). Significant exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Hayward Gallery, London; the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

He and his work received much support and acknowledgment from the famous French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, his friend. He was also supported by, among many others, the Czech art historian Anna Farova.

In 1987 he became a French citizen, and was able to return to Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1991. He then produced Black Triangle, documenting his country's wasted landscape.

Koudelka resides in France and Prague and is continuing his work documenting the European landscape. He has two daughters and a young son, each from a different country: France, England and Italy.

His early work significantly shaped his later photography, and its emphasis on social and cultural rituals as well as death. He soon moved on to a more personal, in depth photographic study of the Gypsies of Slovakia, and later Romania. This work was exhibited in Prague in 1967. Throughout his career, Koudelka has been praised for his ability to capture the presence of the human spirit amidst dark landscapes. Desolation, waste, departure, despair and alienation are common themes in his work. His characters sometimes seem to come out of fairytales. Still, some see hope within his work - the endurance of human endeavor, in spite of its fragility. His later work focuses on the landscape removed of human subjects.

Koudelka received a Degree in Engineering from the Technical University of Prague, Czechoslovakia, during 1956-61.

Awards
- 2004 - Cornell Capa Infinity Award, International Center of Photography, US
- 1992 - Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation Photography Prize, Sweden
- 1991 - Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson, France
- 1987 - Grand Prix National de la Photographie, French Ministry of Culture, France
- 1980 - National Endowment for the Arts Council, US
- 1978 - Prix Nadar, France
- 1976 - British Arts Council Grant to cover life in the British Isles, UK
- 1973 - British Arts Council Grant to cover Gypsy life in Britain, UK
- 1972 - British Arts Council Grant to cover Kendal and Southend, UK
- 1969 - Robert Capa Gold Medal Award, National Press Photographers Association, US
- 1967 - Award by Union of Czechoslovakian Artists, Czechoslovakia