Josef Koudelka crouched on the roof of a building in Wenceslas Square, Prague,
his camera lens trained on the street below. Thousands of Soviet troops
rumbled past in tanks – the city was being invaded. Below him, houses and
buses were ablaze, bullets were flying and the wounded cried out. Protesters
chanted the name of their hero, the Czech president Alexander Dubcek. Some
threw stones at the troops. Others pleaded with the soldiers, begging them
to go home. One man simply stood before a tank, silently opened his jacket
and defied the soldiers to shoot him in the chest.
Snapping away, Koudelka, then 30, almost didn’t notice the people waving and
pointing at him, or the Russian soldiers shouting, assuming he was a sniper.
Suddenly a group of Soviet soldiers charged into the building he was
perching on and gave chase. He fled, his Leica swinging round his neck,
scrambling and ducking over rooftops, through a window and down into the
throng on the street.
It is almost 40 years since the Soviet Union invaded Prague on August 21,
1968. Dubcek’s Prague spring reforms had begun to decentralise the economy
from communist rule, in place since the second world war, and loosen media
and travel restrictions. The Soviet Union and its allies came to reinstate
control. That day, Koudelka was at the hub of the action, risking his life
to capture the photographs on these pages. They have been rated among the
most important in 21st-century photojournalism. A year after the invasion,
Koudelka’s negatives were smuggled out of Prague into the hands of the
world-renowned agency Magnum, and published anonymously in The Sunday Times
Magazine under the initials P P – Prague Photographer. In 1969 the
“anonymous Czech photographer” was presented with the Robert Capa gold medal
for photographs requiring exceptional courage. It was feared that publishing
Koudelka’s name could endanger his life. 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 stayed for more than a decade. Since then he has
travelled the world with his camera and little else.
Now 71, Koudelka rarely gives interviews; he is seldom in one place for long
enough. Years in exile have made him a hardened traveller. When I meet him
at the Magnum office in Paris he is all smiles and whiskery kisses as he
presses a browning clementine into my hand – “breakfast” – and charges
off to fetch tea. But his main focus is always his work: “I don’t do
workshops, I don’t like interviews. I don’t like repeating myself and I
don’t like to preach. My time is limited and I try to use it as best I can.
The most important thing is to keep doing what you love, and I love
photography,” he says.
Koudelka was born in the small village of Boskovice, Czechoslovakia, the son
of a tailor. Once, the local baker arrived at the Koudelkas’ home to deliver
bread, and showed Josef’s father some photographs he had taken with a small
Bakelite camera. Aged 14, Josef was transfixed by them and longed for a
camera of his own. He saved enough to buy one by picking strawberries and
selling them in the village.
Later, he studied to be an engineer and took pictures in his spare time. He
graduated in 1961 and staged his first photographic exhibition the same
year. After that, he began taking commissions from theatre magazines, and
regularly photographed stage productions at Prague’s Theatre Behind the
Gate. He had returned from a project shooting gypsies in Romania just two
days before the Soviet invasion. It was the first time that he had
photographed “news”. “I didn’t know anything about photojournalism,” he
says. “I felt very strongly about what was happening. This was my country,
my problem. I took these pictures for myself, not with the intention of
publication.”
He returned from exile when Czechoslovakia became fully independent in 1989,
but he doesn’t call any place home. “Home is inside myself,” he says. “For
15 years of exile I never had my own place or slept in hotels.” He would
sleep in fields with the gypsies he loved to photograph, or wherever someone
would take him in. He was invited to join the Magnum “family” in 1971, and
would often sleep in the Magnum office in London, using it as his business
address. Now he has a place in Prague and one in Paris; not homes as such,
he explains, more work stations; darkrooms with wide benches and a bed in
case he’s tired. Koudelka says travel gives him a fresh view of the world
and the people he photographs. “The greatest cadeau, the best present exile
gave me, was that I came back to my country after 20 years and saw it as I
never had before. I realised I had lived there but never really looked at
these streets. If I stay in one place, I become blind.”
Koudelka’s passion for photography is compulsive. Even in the midst of the
1968 invasion he was consumed not by fear but by a desire to capture the
event on film. “I don’t consider myself a man with a lot of courage. I am a
visual person and I just reacted to what I saw – everywhere I looked there
was something important to photograph.”
He has purposely avoided becoming tied down and lives as frugally as he can.
“I still don’t have a car, a television, a mobile phone, a wife. What I
don’t have I don’t need. For me the most important thing is to wake up in
the morning, feel well and go and take photographs.”
Everything else has taken a back seat in Koudelka’s life. He has two daughters
and a young son, each from a different country: France, England and Italy.
He has regular contact with them and claims he hasn’t missed out by not
settling for family life. “In Italy someone once called me ‘the dog
who escaped from the chain’. What I wanted I had, and still have.”
But his lifestyle did cost him the love of his life. “The woman I loved, with
whom I had a child and who I wanted to spend my life with, left me. She said
she’d had enough of me leaving all the time, and she was probably completely
right. Of course I was sad – for about a week I was walking like a boxer who
has been beaten up. But then I realised I had to not feel sorry for myself.
I want to be what I want and decide what I want to do – I want to do things
I believe in.” What does Koudelka believe in? “Myself,” he says. “I feel
responsible for my own happiness. I try to be as honest as I can in all
situations. I believe that, confronted with certain situations, I can handle
them. Of course, there are some situations I have not faced: I have never
had a serious disease. Once in my life I was surprised to discover I could
kill a man. Luckily, I did not.” Typically enigmatic, he won’t talk about
the details.
Koudelka has one older sister, Susanna, who lives in Canada. But it is when he
talks about his Magnum associates that one senses real kinship. Henri
Cartier-Bresson, his great friend, died in 2004, but Koudelka admits he
often forgets, even slipping into the present tense when he speaks of him.
“He was a great photographer and we had a very direct relationship – he knew
I would tell him if I didn’t like certain photographs of his, and he would
do the same with me. He is dead but for me he is still alive. When I go to a
museum and see some beautiful painting, I think of buying the postcard and
sending it to him. Only then I realise he is not here any more.”
At 71, Koudelka has the energy of a 17-year-old. He has no plans to retire. “I
hope to die photographing,” he says. “Ever since my sister was a little girl
she has had a dream that one day I would get lost and they would never find
me. I think that would be the best way to go – just get lost and nobody
knows.”
Invasion Prague 68 (Thames & Hudson, £29.95) by Josef Koudelka is
published on May 12. It is available from BooksFirst for £26.95, including postage
and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585
a friend in london send me this infomation, in south africa. she knows that i really like this man. His photographs, his experiences, and most of all, he comes across as most humble. Its even showing in his work. I am a fotographer myself and and the word client does not exist in my vocabulary.
Buyaphi Mdledle, soweto, south africa