“The author’s thirtieth birthday fell on August 1968. He had just come back from Romania where he worked on a reportage taking photographs of Gipsies. It was there that he had decided to end his career as an aviation engineer and to fully focus on photography. One day later, the Russians arrived in Prague…”
“Josef Koudelka, born in Moravia, made his first photographs while a student in the 1950s. About the same time that he started his career as an aeronautical engineer in 1961 he also began photographing Gypsies in Czechoslovakia and theater in Prague. He turned full-time to photography in 1967. The following year, Koudelka photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, publishing his photographs under the initials P. P. (Prague Photographer) for fear of reprisal to him and his family. In 1969, he was anonymously awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for those photographs.
Koudelka left Czechoslovakia for political asylum in 1970 and shortly thereafter joined Magnum Photos. In 1975, he brought out his first book Gypsies, and in 1988, Exiles. 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.” Read an interesting interview. Explore his Magnum’s portofolio.
“Visual techniques for depicting quantities include direct labels (for example, the numerically labeled grids of statistical graphics […]); encoding (color scales); and self-representating scales (objects of known size appearing in an image). Using all these methods, Josef Koudelka’s haunting and vehement photograph, The Urge to See, testifies to the empty streets during the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that ended the Prague Spring of democratic reform. In the foreground, a watch documents the hour (direct label), as the shadows and gray light hint at the time of day (encoding), while in the distance Soviet tanks surround the national museum (self-representing scales, as many familiar objects in perspective demarcate the street and the photographer’s location)”. (Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations, Cheshire: Graphics Press LLC, 1997, p. 13).
