Josef Koudelka: Maker of icons3 min read
‘Never stay for too long in one place,’ Koudelka wrote in the late 1970s. ‘When you stop somewhere, things start to stick. When you go from one place to another, you are cleansing yourself.’
Exiles. Warsaw Pact troops invasion. Prague, Czechoslovakia. 1968. Magnum photos.
The state of rootlessness is intrinsic to the work of Josef Koudelka. A lifetime of ceaseless movement accompanied a striving for preservation through the craft of photography. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1938, Koudelka began to channel his energies into photography in the 1960s, particularly drawn to Roma communities and others at the fringes of society. When Soviet forces invaded Prague, Koudelka documented the events, publishing his photographs under the initials P.P. (Prague Photographer). For these photographs, he was anonymously awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal.
Exiles. Warsaw Pact troops invasion. Prague, Czechoslovakia. 1968. Magnum photos.
1970 marked the year of his exile, and a subsequent life of nomadic restlessness. ‘Never stay in the same place for more than three months,’ became a personal dictum by which he lived. Bound to a self-imposed exile of sorts, Koudelka harnessed his artistic energies from his own displacement. His artistry led him toward a sacralisation of rootlessness, drawn as he was to communities alienated, rejected and often scorned by society. Finding echoes of his own exilic lifestyle, he sought to capture vivid portraits of this condition of alienation, and the intimacies of the internal lives of these communities.
Gypsies, Czechoslovakia, 1963, Magnum photos.
Between the years 1962 and 1971, Koudelka devoted himself to a project entitled ‘Gypsies,’ in which he documented the daily lives of Roma people across Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. With his possessions stripped down to his photography equipment, a rucksack and a sleeping bag, Koudelka committed himself to a nomadic lifestyle as he worked for a decade on this series.
Gypsies, Czechoslovakia, 1966. Magnum photos.
Gypsies, Romania, 1968. Magnum photos.
“I didn’t have a flat—I didn’t need one,” he said in a discussion with Czech author Karel Hvíždala in 2002. “On the contrary, I tried to avoid owning anything. What I needed most was to travel so that I could take photographs…I knew that I didn’t need much to function—some food and a good night’s sleep. I had a rule: ‘Don’t worry where you are going to sleep; so far you’ve slept almost every night, you’ll sleep again tonight. And if you sleep outdoors, you have two choices: to be afraid that something might happen to you and then you won’t sleep well, or accept the fact that anything might happen and get a good night’s sleep, which is the most important thing you need to function well the next day.’”
Gypsies, Czechoslovakia, 1963. Magnum photos.
Gypsies, Czechoslovakia, 1966. Magnum photos.
It was during his work on this project that Koudelka became known as ikonar, or ‘maker of icons’ by a group of Roma he encountered on his travels. The nickname came into being when the community began to use his photographs of them as quasi-religious icons in their place of worship. His craft became a medium which not only preserved the intricacies of daily life, but sacralised them into a vessel for worship. Thus does the intersection of preservation and sanctity emerge from the artform of photography. Every photograph constitutes a return—a return to roots from a place of exile. For the rootless and the displaced, a medium such as photography can be the vital force which preserves the mythic heritage that remains within.
Exiles, Czechoslovakia, 1968. Magnum photos.
