“I’m quite different from other people,” the legendary eighty-six-year-old Czech photographer Josef Koudelka was saying the other day at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, where his first solo American show in nearly a decade was about to open. “No kidding,” Melissa Harris responded, and Koudelka began laughing and nodding in a way that said, You ought to know. She was, after all, his biographer.
Josef loves a challenge, a visual challenge. He had not really worked in this way before, where there had to be a clear relationship between text and image.
“I try to be a photographer. I cannot talk. I am not interested in talking. If I have anything to say, it may be found in my images. I am not interested in talking about things, explaining about the whys and the hows. I do not mind showing my images, but not so much my contact sheets. I mainly work from small test prints. I often look at them, sometimes for a long time. I pin them to the wall, I compare them to make up my mind, be sure of my choices. I let others tell me what they mean. [To Robert Delpire] My photographs, you know them. You have published them, you have exhibited them, then you can tell whether they mean something or not.”
The duty of a photojournalist, according to many, is to remain detached in a moment of crisis, to compartmentalize scenes of violence and war from the goings on of everyday life. As suggested by Italian journalist Mario Calabresi in his extraordinary book Eyes Wide Open, however, the best storytellers are those who allow themselves to be submerged within often painful events, to forgo absolute objectivity in favor of something rarer: a precarious marriage of impartiality and intimate involvement. In interviews with ten photographers who have not only documented but in many ways shaped the course of history—Steve McCurry, Josef Koudelka, Don McCullin, Elliott Erwitt, Paul Fusco, Alex Webb, Gabriele Basilico, Abbas, Paolo Pellegrin, and Sebastiao Salgado— Calabresi peels back the layers that lie behind iconic images to reveal the nuances of each frame and the living, breathing people who stood behind the lens.
As suggested by Italian journalist Mario Calabresi in his extraordinary book Eyes Wide Open, however, the best storytellers are those who allow themselves to be submerged within often painful events, to forgo absolute objectivity in favor of something rarer: a precarious marriage of impartiality and intimate involvement. In interviews with ten photographers who have not only documented but in many ways shaped the course of history—Steve McCurry, Josef Koudelka, Don McCullin, Elliott Erwitt, Paul Fusco, Alex Webb, Gabriele Basilico, Abbas, Paolo Pellegrin, and Sebastiao Salgado
From one spectacular location to another, the director Gilad Baram, then assistant to Josef Koudelka (who allowed himself to be filmed for the first time), followed him on his journey in the Holy Land
Koudelka Shooting Holy Land, a new documentary film making its U.S. debut today at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (and showing again this Sunday, July 31), gives viewers an opportunity to watch Koudelka photograph in Israel and the West Bank from his assistant’s perspective
Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land, the debut documentary film of Israeli-born photographer Gilad Baram, offers a unique and intimate look into the creative process of world-renowned Czech photographer Josef Koudelka.
Since 1986, when I began to work on the landscapes of France for the Mission DATAR with a panoramic camera, I’ve tried to show how contemporary man influences the landscape. But I’d never seen anything similar to this. From my point of view, I could not find a subject more powerful than the Wall that mutilates the Holy Land.
For a land so deeply entrenched with history and conflict, Israel is not an easy subject to approach in a photography project, especially from a single standpoint. Born out of an idea by Frédéric Brenner, a French photographer who has long explored Jewish
‘This Place’ is the title given to the internationally touring exhibition that presents the work of twelve artists who were commissioned to research and work in Israel and the West Bank, created primarily between 2009 and 2012 by Frédéric Brenner, Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington. Together, they act as a heterogeneous narrative of a conflicted, paradoxical and deeply resonant place.
I’ve never been interested in photojournalism that attempts to tell a story through several pictures. I’ve always sought out pictures that tell a story in themselves, letting each viewer see a story that suits them. For me, a good photograph is one that tells a different story to each person who sees it
For nearly five decades, the Czech-born photographer Josef Koudelka has been traveling nonstop. “I never stay in one country more than three months,” he told Lens blog in a rare interview. “Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.”
After years of taking striking photos of Gypsies, the Czech photographer stood before the tanks during the 1968 invasion. He smuggled out his images, they went round the world and he fled to Britain. Here are his most poignant and powerful shots
Amanda Maddox of the Getty Museum, Josef Koudelka, and Matt Witkovsky of the AIC on the dais. Words and photos by Dan Gorman I attended the opening of the Josef Koudelka exhibit at AIC last week. I walked through the…
Koudelka had a number of interesting things to say (all heavily paraphrased here, as I didn’t try take notes during the event, but scribbled down the bits that lingered in memory immediately afterward):
Link: Josef Koudelka: A Restless Eye – NYTimes.com
I was using this Fuji panoramic — but the problem was everyone stopped developing the film. You can’t get 220 film anymore and you needed to carry about 35 kilograms extra. I went to Leica and they did one camera for me that was digital panoramic, which is this S2 camera, and they make two lines and set it on black and white. I made four trips with it together with the film camera. In the last two trips I realized I was taking more pictures with this Leica and I am enjoying it more. The result is very comparable. The lens was exactly the same.
I don’t like picture stories. In fact I think picture stories destroyed all photography. You needed to have a close-up and you needed to do other things and for me I am interested in one picture that tells many different stories to different people. That is to me a sign of the good picture.
Legendary photographer Josef Koudelka packed the house at the Paramount Theater in downtown Charlottesville during the Look3 Festival of the Photograph over the weekend, and the audience greeted him with a standing ovation after master of ceremonies, phot
Koudelka also told the audience at the outset that he “never listened much to what [other] photographers say,” and recounted how Henri Cartier-Bresson had asked him to read and comment on the text of The Decisive Moment before that book was published. “I said to Bresson I’m really not interested and I’m not going to read it.” Koudelka added, “I think the best portrait of a photographer are his photographs, so please judge me on my photographs.”
I know of few photographers knowledgeable of the work of Josef Koudelka who do not look upon his life as an artist with a certain level of romanticism. It holds true to a young photographer’s dream to have little by way of possessions beyond cameras, some film and the freedom to obsessively focus on the immediacy of the world through the lens
