photostream

Koudelka appears on PDN’s 25 most influential photographers list. There are a number of greatest hits type compilation books of his work, and he appears as an entry on many of the websites which give short biographies of the great and the good of photography (although a websearch is made slightly more complicated by the fact that ‘Koudelka’ is also the name of a Playstation game). His is the sort of name that many photographers will have heard of even if they are not familiar with his work.

Becoming passingly familiar with his work is easy – thanks to the greatest hits books – but getting a deeper view of it is difficult because of cost. This post was delayed from an earlier month because I was trying to track down a copy of either ‘Gypsies’ or ‘Exiles’ for a sensible amount of money. I failed. As I typed this I did another price check on abebooks.co.uk. The cheapest copy of ‘Exiles’ in the UK was £140 and there wasn’t a copy of ‘Gypsies’ listed. One US seller wanted over £700 for a copy of Gypsies.

A book that you can just go out and buy, though, is from a Czech publisher, Torst. It is called, simply, Josef Koudelka. Text is repeated in English and Czech and the quality of the reproductions is high. Certainly much better than the Photo Poche book that I also have. ISBN 80-7215-166-5. It is listed by both UK and US Amazon for less than £10. It is a small format book which doesn’t suit Koudelka’s later work, which is panoramic shaped, but for the rest it is fine. ‘Gypsies’ and ‘Exiles’ are both covered, but so is other work. Worth getting.

For the panoramic work you really need to see ‘Chaos’, which is fortunately still in print. This is a large book, so budget for some deeper bookshelves. Even so, the publisher has decided to print some of the photos across two pages. Why do people do this? It might look great on screen during the layout, but in the resulting book pictures are invariably ruined, despite the extra scale.

The web biographies give slightly contradictory details, but broadly Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970, shortly after his photographs of the Russian invasion of his country were published in the West. He became a member of Magnum and, via asylum in England, became a French citizen.

With his background and subject matter you probably wouldn’t expect Koudelka’s pictures to be full of colour and sunlight. They are not. If he has ever taken a colour picture for publication I haven’t come across it. I can’t tell what the original prints are like, but the reproductions have a heaviness about them. Regardless of format, there isn’t much in the way of light in a Koudelka photograph. His use of the large panoramic format cameras is interesting in that the resulting photographs are distinguished from his early work more by the shape of the resulting reproduction than anything else. Koudelka has brought bleakness to a camera format more often associated with blue skies and pretty scenery. Or as Nubar Alexanian puts it :”This is not to say that Koudelka does not delight in the panorama format. Quite the contrary. But Koudelka is Koudelka, and he has more important fish to fry”.

Perhaps ‘bleakness’ isn’t quite the right word. An essay by Max Kozloff refers to “a certain exclusionary genius”. Koudelka’s photos are notable for what they don’t include as much as for what they do. At first glance they are documentary, but as this quote from Anna Fárová suggests what they document is as much to do with the photographer as the scene: “(Koudelka) does not photograph reality as it is, but as he imagines it and feels it.” This is true of all photographers. They decide what to include and what to exclude. The point here being that Koudelka’s decisions are distinctive.

Distinctive but difficult to pin down. Koudelka started photographing the theatre. He was previously an aeronautics engineer. This is his reply to a question about the differences between photographing theatre and the real world: “A performance in theatre is something complete in itself – what more can you do with it? Documentation, the recording of a performance, never interested me. Another possibility was to take the performance as an initial reality and try to make something different out of it”. It is precisely this that Koudelka seems to be doing in his ‘real world’ photography as well. Documentation is just a happenchance. That picture of the English countryside, or the Slovakian bride, stand for much more than the specifics of there and then. They are summaries of all similar places and people. You might not need to see another picture of the same subject. You already understand it.

In suitably melodramatic language an actor once told Koudelka that he “didn’t photography the theatre. You photographed the soul of the theatre”.

This doesn’t always make for decorative photographs.

Next month: I hope to write about Masahisa Fukase, but a book appears to have gone missing in the post so I might have to change plans.

Some related posts chosen by the software:

• PDN (25 most influential)
• 360 degrees
• Iceland by Josef Hoflehner