three rabbits to inaugurate the month of July (and recognize, with a flourish of maple leaves, Canada Day), with American Independence Day about to be upon us — plenty of local fireworks on Saturday night, more to come; and it’s time to contemplate my annual celebratory (kosher) hot dog
Meanwhile, Hana Filip posted, on Facebook yesterday , this enigmatic photo — Napoli 1979, by Josef Koudelka — without explanation or other comment:
(#1) A young woman sunbathing, face down, on a Naples seawall while reading from a book
Which I turned into an exploration of Koudelka’s life and work. My response:
Some context would help; Hana no doubt supposed that everyone would know Koudelka and his story, and they probably should, but I suspect he’s not the household name she believes him to be. [In later comments, I noted that, despite their generational difference, HF and JK share crucial personal history — happy childhoods in Moravia, lives ripped apart by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia — so that she’s close in spirit to JK and will have little idea of what the rest of the world knows or thinks about him.]
In any case, Josef Koudelka is the Czech-born (in Moravia specifically) photographer of exiles and wanderers and [the dispossessed and misfits] and survivors of dark times. Photographed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and then fled to the West, becoming himself an exile and wanderer, though taking French citizenship in 1987.
Able to return to Czechia in 1990 and now has home bases in both Paris and Prague, but is always restlessly on the road, taking pictures, many of them dark and heart-breaking, but holding out hope.
Meanwhile, he’s a defiant outsider, still (at the age of 86, two years older than me) railing passionately and profanely about the fucking bullshit of all sorts of officialdom (interviews with him are a hoot). Deeply discomfiting, and (to my misfit, outsider eyes) admirable.
JK’s books include: Gitans (Gypsies), 1975; Exiles, 1988; Chaos, 1999; Koudelka: Camargue, 2006 (on the vast French marshland); Wall, 2013 (on the barrier separating Israel and Palestine).
Of these, Exiles (with its enigmatic and often disturbing images) serves as a kind of summing-up of his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Two examples:
(#2) England 1976: a man looking to the side, with an empty road in front of him
(#3) Parc de Sceaux 1987: in the Paris suburb, a dog in the snow, looking vampirish
And then there are the Prague Invasion photos, from which just this one:
(#4) Prague, August 1968: invasion by Warsaw Pact troops in front of the Radio headquarters in Prague, August 1968
Hana Filip tells me that there’s a whole gallery of JK’s photos from the invasion, available on-line, on the Magnum Magazine site: “Josef Koudelka: The 1968 Prague Invasion: Josef Koudelka recalls the night the Prague Spring ended and his journey toward becoming a Magnum photojournalist began”. As I wrote to HF:
I still can’t believe he took those photos and somehow got out of there alive.
But he did, fleeing first to England and then to France.