Thursday, March 5, 2009

Josef Koudelka



Assignment for Adv NF class.
I compiled some Koudelka photographs to go with this essay.






Asleep on a Burlap Sack,
Josef Koudelka

Who took these photographs? And what do they mean? This man has traveled. How old is he? Who are these strange people? Are they his friends? His family maybe?

We come to knowing a man by seeing the places he has been. While we never view his face, we see pieces of his body. An outstretched fist, displaying a wristwatch before an empty street. It is 6:00 PM in Prague, 1968. Flip ahead and it is 10:38, somewhere in Spain, 1976. We see him in a pair of rolled up, loose bluejeans and creased leather shoes, worn from travel. He is resting his legs against the trunk of a young tree. We see the simplicity of his lifestyle in an unfolded newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, used as a plate. He eats a baguette with cheese and an apple sliced horizontally, revealing the centrical star in holding the seeds.

He is a man who lived without a home for over half his life. He is a photographer.

When Josef Koudelka ended a career as an engineer in Bratislava, he let the right side of his brain grow over the left. He began his career in photography taking photographs of Czech absurdist theater performances, including, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. But his real interest was in the Gypsies. He explored what was then the lower part of his country, Slovakia and learned the language, played their music and listened quietly to their stories. He was a gypsy, sleeping on a burlap sack on the floors of acquaintances and waking early to catch the light.
One day, with no warning, Prague was invaded. Josef took over two thousand exposures of crowds, violence, streets, rebellion, machinery, and anger. His photographs were published anonymously and he left his home for a nomadic life to be had elsewhere. He traveled over Europe, and the rest of the world, finding and documenting other exiles. He did not return to Prague for over 30 years.
Photography is unlike other artistic mediums because it is influenced by technology, unlike painting or sculpture which has changed very little in the past hundreds of years. Painters and sculptors use the same instruments and can ignore the digitized world, while photographers cannot. Josef Koudelka remained devoutly loyal to his Leica 25mm for most of his life until 1986, when he traded it for a panoramic camera. I was born in 1987, and for my own unexplainable reasons, I gravitate to his Leica photographs. As a collection, these photographs show the movements of one man tracking the diasporas of Europe, carrying the weight of a German steel devices with precise lenses, and rolls of sensitive film in his backpack.
This technology was the most valuable thing Josef Koudelka ever owned. The most fascinating thing about Koudelka is his ability to move. He never put down roots, he never paid rent, not until a few years ago when he finally purchased an apartment in Paris and one in Prague. He is 70 years old and still taking photographs.
The French journalist Bernard Cuau wrote of his friend, “He is the one who lives in dangerous places and who heads for uncertain destinations. He has been an exile... and as a matter of principal has refused to master any one language fully – which is an easy way of avoiding questions.”
Rather than allow others to ask the questions, it is Josef Koudelka’s photographs that ask the audience questions. Look again at the photographs. Do you see the tortoise in the middle of the dirt road? He is immobile. His body is upside-down. His neck is stretched, looking to the ground, and he is trying to regain support on his feet rather than balancing on the shape of his convex shell. The tortoise’s scaly legs and sharp toenails scrape uselessly into the air. He runs faster than his body allows him on the ground, but he goes nowhere. How did he get in this difficult position? And how will he get out of it? There is a trodden dirt road that disappears over a hill. It isn’t too far. Where does it lead? Where will the tortoise go, once he is back on his feet?

First came Josef’s love of Gypsy music. After college, Josef Koudelka traveled to Italy with a Slavic folk band. He knew how to dance the Klezmer. The nomadic Romani (Gypsy) people are known for wandering across North Africa, the Middle East, but especially in Eastern Europe, working as tradesmen and musicians. Over centuries the Romani have collected musical influences from the distances they have traveled: India, Arabia, Persia, Iberia, Bohemia, and Slovakia. Accordions chase guitars, trumpets parade by the pianos, and brass drums play beside the cimbalom.
Gypsy voices are unusually adenoid and rough with wide ranges and the song's notes rise and fall over the violins squealing glissando. There is a sadness and pride to Romani music that is always present, although the languages and instruments change by region. Some instruments travel from one generation onto the next. Many families play music together, during festivals, weddings, and wakes. Fathers give their sons the violins that their fathers gave unto them.
Second, Josef was attracted to the physicality of the Gypsies.
The hereditary dark skin and pronounced features of the Romani highlight their expressions of exaltation and sadness. Josef Koudelka photographed the small daily joy and heartbreak of these communities. The most beautiful and captivating photographs he took were of tradition and rituals: the dusted wrinkles on old women’s faces at funerals. He captured street concerts in photographs: the crowds gathered to listen and lines of smiling crooked teeth unknown to dentists. Josef was a magician with his camera: he froze juggler’s objects in midair, onlookers stare with eyes forever affixed towards the sky.
Josef Koudelka has never been confused for a fashion photographer like his contemporary Richard Avedon. He never stepped into a studio and only photographed his subjects and landscapes using available light. Yet, he was able to capture the timeless style of Romanian and Slavic gypsies. The men wear patched suits and women wear long homemade dresses and thick knitted sweaters covering their shoulders. There are no athletic logos or tiny alligator insignia decorating the breast pockets of shirts. The people have no need for branding, not even for their cattle, which is cared for communally.
Finally, and most completely, Josef fell in love with the gypsy lifestyle. Free from consumerism, and free to travel and live as they like, Josef adopted this life. He traveled the world taking photographs of Man, Community, Ritual, and Death. He worked for the premier international photojournalism co-op, Magnum Photos. But he took few assignments from Magnum, instead he continued to ramble by his own design. The themes of alienation, despair, and desolation resonate throughout his work, while somehow maintaining a hopefulness and sense of humor.
His scenes lack the usual bookmarks of time- there are no advertisements, no posters in the background, no logos or other recognizable cultural cues. The audience is placed in a moment that could be almost anywhere, anytime. It is this timeless quality that makes Koudelka’s photographs so memorable. Other photographers aim to capture historical moments, celebrities, assassinations, space shuttle launches, or disasters. Josef Koudelka wants to preserve scenes that could happen in any family of Man.
Koudelka formed a strong connection to his subjects. Other photographers encapsulate private moments in photographs can objectify or exploit the subject. An arrest, a funeral, a gunshot, or a kiss. Josef does not steal these moments. He preserves them storing the happy and sad in the same frame. An unobtrusive man, his photographs are like gifts given to family members. But the Gypsies, who rarely use mirrors have even less care for visages of what they looked like in yesterdays.
“Even the Gypsies were sorry for me because they thought I was poorer than them. At night they were in their caravans and I was the guy who was sleeping outside beneath the sky,” he said in an August 2008 interview.
The gypsies are abused by the government and overlooked by the masses for not making substantial economic contributions to society. The photographs of Slovakia taken in 1963 are of these families that Josef found so captivating. These families lived no regard for the popular culture. Josef also chose to live this way, with these same values. He relied on his friends, relationships, hard work, and personal curiosities rather than social norms or material objects and never felt tied down to a particular city or country.

"They can crush the flowers, but they can’t stop the Spring" - Alexander Dubcek August 21, 1968
It is the morning of his return. Josef is back to Prague after six months spent in Romania on an anthropological Gypsy assignment. In the night some 200,000 soldiers and 2,000 tanks drove through the streets of Prague beginning the lasting Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and violently halting Alexander Dubcek's ‘Prague Spring’ political liberalization reforms. Josef took over 5,000 photographs during the first week of occupation. His negatives were secretly messengered out of Prague by his curator friend, Anna Farova, and passed to the Magnum offices in Paris. The images were published anonymously using the name PP (Prague Photographer.) Josef feared for the lives of his family.
“'For a long time no one here was interested in remembering, but now I think they start to remember again. If this book helps the remembering I am happy. We Czechs are not like you Irish or the Poles. We do not behave bravely many times against the odds, but in this one week, as my book shows, we should be very proud of how we behave.”
After the invasion, Koudelka moved to London. He continued to sleep on the floors and couches of friends. After his three-month visa expired, he chose not to return to the Czech Republic. He became officially “stateless”, like the subject in the majority his photographs. The UK granted him asylum, where he stayed until 1979, continuing to live from a suitcase while he traveled Europe and made photographs. His images of public life are also images of the ver things that tie men together. The still of a suited man in Spain with some kind of rocket is magical. The scene seems strange to the audience. The smoke obscures the face. Why is he dressed so fashionably? Why is he releasing a missile?
In 1984, following the death of his father, Koudelka finally published his name beside his images of the Prague Invasion. He had remained anonymous for 16 years, in fear that the Czechoslovakian government would harm his family. His work began to be appreciated worldwide, including a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery and later the Museum of Modern Art NY, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam.
Three years later he returned to Czechoslovakia after 20 years in exile. He uses his panoramic camera to capture some of the most environmentally devastated natural land in the world, the ‘Black Triangle’, where the Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic meet. Named accordingly, The Black Triangle is one of Europe's most heavily polluted regions. The air there is thick with lignite, a soft brown coal mined locally, dust created by communist heating plants. Since the end of the Cold War, greater efforts have been made to reverse the area’s air pollution.
Today, Koudelka moves between Paris and Prague. He has two daughters and a young son, each from a different woman and each from a different country: France, England and Italy (in that order.)

The forward to Koudelka’s book Exiles was written by fellow Czech exile, Nobel Prize recipient, Czesław Miłosz. “Now hundreds of thousands, and even millions, migrate, chased from their homes by war, by harsh economic necessities, or political persecution, and an expatriate, for instance a writer, an artist, an intellectual who left his country for his own, so to say, fastidious reasons, motivated as he was not only by fear of starvation or of the police, cannot isolate his fate from the fate of those masses. Their nomadic existence, the slums they often inhabit, the deserts of dirty streets where their children play are, in a way, his own; he feels solidarity with them and he only wonders whether this is not an image, more and more generalized, of the human condition.”
Yes, Josef Koudelka is part of the masses of the global Diaspora. He moves easily, swept along with the global political, social, and economic current. But there is more to these photographs than dirty streets, poverty, and isolation. He finds simple happiness beside suffering. In the photograph of the Slovakian funeral, a large crowd gathers around the body of a woman. A white light saturates the central figure in the photograph. The mourner’s profiles are aglow, but the only faces acknowledging the camera are those of the children. Where there is grief, there is also hope.





references:
Magnum Images. Ritual. London: Andre
Deutsch Limited, 1990.
Thames & Hudson,
Photofile. Josef Koudelka. London: Thames & Hudson Inc. 2007.
O’Hagan, Sean. “40 years on: the exile comes home to Prague." The Observer. 24 Aug. 2008. 21 Oct 2008
.