In his work with Romanian Gypsies and the Roma, Koudelka became very closely embedded with the people he was photographing. Koudelka’s earliest work is some of the most challenging to engage with. These five images are meant to roughly break down his long and varied career, beginning with his work with Gypsies in the mid-1960s, and carrying us right up to the present day. While I could easily populate this feature with five images of Prague in 1968, to do so would be a disservice to Koudelka. To Koudelka, evolution and creative mobility is essential to his work. With the exception that at the beginning he was the best.” As he said in this New York Times interview “I am still going on because I don’t put so many limitations on myself. While he always knows where he wants to go, he seems to relish in his ability to change his trajectory, both in his travel and in his work. He has never stayed in one place for more than three months in the past four decades, and this has forced his work to evolve continually with his worldview. Though he’s been a French citizen since 1987, he claims no homeland. Since 1968, Koudelka has been continually on the move. While the images from the Prague Spring may represent Koudelka’s most iconic work, they are not the end of his portfolio, nor are they very representative of the rest of his work. In 1968 he photographed the uprisings in Prague, the negatives from which were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia to Magnum, and published anonymously in the Sunday Times. Koudelka became interested in photography in his early twenties and began working as a photographer in the early 1960s, ultimately leaving a career as an aircraft engineer to pursue photography. The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic would remain in power for forty-two years, until the division of the Czech Republic and Slovakia took place in the early 1990s. Weeks after he turned ten, Czechoslovakian Communists, with the aid of the Soviet Union, seized control of the government. Before he was a year old, the first Czechoslovak Republic was dissolved by Adolph Hitler. Koudelka was born in Czechoslovakia in January, 1938. These two things about Koudelka are inextricably linked, just as the trajectory of Koudelka’s life and work is very much linked to the trajectory of the former Czechoslovakia. Josef Koudelka is a man without a country, and a photographer who works beyond the constraint of any particular genre. Today’s FFP comes by way of Chris, and the shooter spotlight is on Josef Koudelka. Five Favorite Photos is a feature in which one of the writers here at CP picks a well-known photographer and takes on the near-impossible task of picking just five favorite shots from that pro.
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