"The Photographs I Love" 9 – Koudelka

“I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the sight itself.”
(Josef Koudelka)

 

Josef Koudelka. “Funeral wake”, 1963

I am coming to the conclusion of the first ten photographs that I loved the most.

Inevitable that I have to talk about Josef Koudelka, the Czech photographer born in 1938.

Why is it inevitable? Because his book “Gypsies” was one of the first I bought and remains, for me, the most beautiful photography book, the one to have absolutely.

 

Josef Koudelka 

 

His story is well known, of how a phone call turned his life upside down.

“The phone rings at 4 in the morning, a friend screams: “The Russians have arrived.” […] I understand that something is happening. I get dressed quickly, I take my camera and all the films I have left, I had only returned the day before from Romania, where I had been to photograph the gypsies.”

 

He is 30 years old, that August 21, 1968. Take the iconic photo on the deserted esplanade of San Vanceslao, on August 22, with his watch in the foreground to make it clear what time it was.

200 rolls of films will be released which will represent one of the greatest reports in history on the bloody repression of the Prague Spring.

The rolls left Prague hidden in the suitcase of a doctor who had come to the city for a congress; they reached the Magnum agency and ended up published in the periodical “The Sunday Times” signed only with the initials P. P. (“Prague Photographer”) to avoid retaliation against him and his family.

It was thanks to Magnum that he was able to leave Prague and live in exile for 20 years, without being able to tell his parents that those photographs that were traveling around the world and winning prizes were his photos.

They will die without ever knowing.

 

San Vanceslao Square, 1968

 

It was then that he returned to his project on the gypsies of central Europe, because as it is often said Koudelka was nomadic at heart.

The anecdote that Alex Webb tells is emblematic:

“A few years ago I was sitting on the subway with Josef Koudelka, whom I had not seen for several years. Suddenly Josef leaned forward and grabbed my shoe, turning it to look at the sole. With his direct way of doing, typical of Czech culture, he wanted to make sure that I had walked enough – and therefore photographed enough.”

 

Koudelka's personality is fascinating and complex, as mysterious as the St. Charles Bridge in winter, for anyone who has visited Prague and understands what I mean.

The exile marked him deeply but made him capable of a different way of seeing.

“When you live in place for a long time, you become blind because you no longer observe anything. I travel so as not to go blind.”

 

It is during exile that he returns to work on the reportage on the gypsies, as I said.

The first version of 1968 failed to be printed in 1970 because he was forced to leave Prague.

In Paris, he goes back to those photographs: 60 images taken in the gypsies’ camps of Slovakia between 1962 and 1968, released in 1975 with the title “Gitans”.

The current version, which can be found in the bookstore, is the one enlarged to 109 photographs taken in the former Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France and Spain between 1962 and 1971.

 

1969 

It's a poignant book, with black ink that seems to stain the fingers, grainy and alive.

He is not interested in representing the life of gypsies in a didactic way (before the term Rom entered the vocabulary, more polite but less truthful), or making a social report.

“I wanted to talk about life, what's more universal? I didn't want to make a historical documentary but to talk about existence, from children to death, this interested me.”

 

This makes it a mythical book, at least in my eyes; like when you read the Odyssey, the “Brothers Karamazov”, the “Don Quixote”. You know you have something in your hands that is out of ordinary.

Each photograph is full of life, emotions, total absence of the slightest prejudice.

He lived there with the gypsies, he follows them at their festivals, in the chariots during their journeys, in poor and dirty houses, in front of naked, wild, cheerful bodies, splendid children and elderly people with wrinkled skin like fossils.

Always photographing with an atypical wide angle, which made him tremble when Cartier-Bresson asked to show him his photos, because he knew that the French master hated the wide angle.

But Koudelka did not use it at a distance to enclose large spaces, but in close contact with people, to include every possible emotion and smell.

It is no coincidence that Cartier-Bresson chose two photos for him, one of the man in handcuffs and the other of the wake of 1963.

This is the photo that Koudelka loved most, and I totally agree and have shown it in every workshop I have held on the Masters of Photography.

 

1963

Anyone who photographs knows how difficult it is to be invisible to others, to be shadows of the subjects that are photographed.

We are there, with our presence, the camera and its sounds, our gaze that weighs.

This happens in accordance with the level of intimacy we are able to establish with the people in front of us. The more distant and “unknown” we are, the more it will be impossible to act discreetly, silently.

But if we manage to enter the private area that everybody has around it, if we manage to become part of the family, we cease to be photographers, and we become of the same flesh holding a camera as it could be a cigarette or a fruit or a toothpick.

We are no longer noticed.

 

1967 

 

Only in that moment does the photo become unique, a wonderful symbol of this sharing common presences.

This should be explained because, to non-photographers, it may seem like a simple photograph of a wake, nothing transcendental.

Therefore it must be said and repeated that this is a photograph of an incredible difficulty, because although the moment is so private and full of pain, crowded with suffering, there is not a single adult person who turns to look at Koudelka who takes the picture: as if the sound of his camera and his presence were like the tears and sighs of the people in that room.

Only children look at it, but you know, children are not part of our world, they have their own particular dimension with rules of their own that only Saint-Exupéry has been able to describe perfectly with “The Little Prince”.

It is a magical, unsurpassed photo.

 

That you observe it once, ten, a hundred times and sighs of such beauty.

And you think no one will ever be able to photograph gypsies better than Koudelka did.

But this doesn't have to be a scythe that cuts the leg of our ambitions.

Rather an invitation to aspire to one day be able to take photographs that come close to these, to achieve total empathy with those who are completely far from us.

 

To open your eyes.

Not to be blind.

 

1967

 

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• "The Photographs I Love" – Series 
  

Josef Koudelka: “Gypsies” (Contrasto, 2011)
Mario Calabresi: “Ad occhi aperti” (Contrasto, 2013)

Italian version