Josef Koudelka – IKONAR

#1 min Pavel Vančát, Josef Koudelka

29. 1. 2024

#46 TourismMemoryCurating

Josef Koudelka (*1938), the most famous living Czech photographer, has been taking stock in recent years: the year before last, editor Tomáš Pospěch prepared an engaging selection from Koudelka's diaries, and last November, a comprehensive and unusual catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition in Lausanne, which was the result of detailed research into his image archive. Editor Lars Willumeit (who has gone through over 30,000 sheets of cinefilm contacts and other archival material) offers here a textual and pictorial summary of the various stages of J.K.'s work, as well as thematic probes across his career. Stuart Alexander's text on the fifty-year development of the various editions of Gypsies details how the photographic nomad maintained the precision of an aeronautical engineer. Filled with engaging professional detail, the book is an extraordinarily candid insight into the work and methods of a photographer who spent a lifetime championing his own freedom and creativity.

 

Josef Koudelka, IKONAR: Archival Constellations. Lausanne: Photo Elysée, / Leipzig: Spector Books, 2022

#46 TourismMemoryCuratingArchiveDiaryDocumentTourismAuthor's review

Pavel Vančát

is a free-lance curator and writer, based in Prague. Since 2008, he has worked as project curator of StartPoint: prize for European Art Graduates. He has curated dozens of exhibitions of contemporary art, photography, and visual culture. He was the head curator of Prague’s Fotograf Festival 2019 and co-curator of m3 Sculpture Festival 2020: Layers of History.

Josef Koudelka

started to work in photography in 1958. In 1968, he documented the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, which won the Robert Capa Gold Medal and is now considered a classic work of post-war reportage photography. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1974. In 1975, he published the book Gypsies in collaboration with the French publisher Robert Delpire, followed by Exiles in 1988. Since then, Josef Koudelka has published sixteen books dedicated to documenting the human influence on the contemporary landscape.

#46 Tourism

It is interesting how much the world of photography is connected with tourism, in other words, how much the two domains may have in common. If we look at them through the lens of a mass phenomenon, they may even be similarly old. And it is in this perspective that a number of controversial questions arise in all their clarity. To what extent has tourism affected many of the coastlines and unique destinations that attract tourists? And to what extent does photography influence our perception of the places we visit?

Josef Koudelka – Ruins

#2 min Tomáš Pospěch, Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka – Ruins

#46 TourismProfileHistory

What will Prague or New York look like in a thousand or two thousand years? My aim here is not to contribute to the dystopian genre, so popular today. But we do have a sufficient historical experience of the emergence and demise of civilizations. It is therefore not so hard to imagine that where New York City used to stand, waves will beat against the remaining concrete foundations of a few skyscrapers and Prague too will be reduced to the ruins of a few of the most significant buildings – if the city isn’t entirely abandoned, that is. Without depicting these scenes directly, such notions might follow from Josef Koudelka’s newest photographic series, titled Ruins.

Filip Láb – Apostle of Future Photography

#5 min Filip Láb, Pavel Vančát

Filip Láb – Apostle of Future Photography

#41 Postdigital PhotographyProfilePostdigital photography

Filip Láb, who died unexpectedly and prematurely in May 2021, was not only a prominent theorist and teacher of photography, but was also one of a generation of artists that dealt with the shift in political polarities and radical changes in the photographic paradigm. His relatively short but very significant creative period, tied to his collaboration with Bára Mrázková, still surprises with its innovation and precision.