Josef Koudelka – Ruins

Since 1986, whne he made his first photographs for DATAR, a French urbanist institution, he has photographed a number of projects in panoramic formats. People only rarely appear in these images. The center of attention is human interaction with the landscape; how people transform the landscape through industrial activity or through conflict. The photographs for this newest collection were created over a long time period, which is, after all, typical of the work of Josef Koudelka. He shot these images between 1991 and 2017. They were created on over two hundred archeological digs in the Mediterranean, at locations including Albania, Algeria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. Before they were given their final form within the Ruins book exhibition, they were presented at the Vestiges exhibition in Marseilles in 2013.

Ruins is primarily a project about memory. Josef Koudelka always photographed a world that  is disappearing and which we need to be reminded of – the Roma population, the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, religious festivities, traditional psychiatric hospitals – or explores the layers of the memory of a landscape constructed through human activity, whether this means industry, mining, or war. We should remind ourselves that landmarks and archeological are not simply crossing points of the neuralgic networks of global tourism that contribute to the income of the countries they are found in and undoubtedly participate in the maintenance of these sites. These “ancient beauties” are also materializations of ambition and power – they were often created through slave labor and as the result of trade and war. Are downfalls beautiful? At least the images of downfall are beautiful, as Josef Koudelka would have us believe. A black-and-white image of Greek and Roman ruins in the morning Sun can be just as fascinating as looking at the burning cabin in the finale of Miloš Forman’s film Hoří, má panenko (The Firemen’s Ball, 1967). We can admire ravishing monuments and also feel that what has become of the ancient sites of the Mediterranean is a fate that also awaits our own civilization, sooner or later.

Image captions

1 | Josef Koudelka, ›Ruins‹, Turkey, Side, 2011
2 | Josef Koudelka, ›Ruins‹, Turkey, Aphrodisias, 2006
3 | Josef Koudelka, ›Ruins‹, Jordan, Amman, 2012
4 | Josef Koudelka, ›Ruins‹, Greece, Delphi, 1991
all © Josef Koudelka/ Magnum Photos, Courtesy of the Josef Koudelka Foundation