Josef Koudelka: Emotion, Exile and the Wide Black and White Frame

Josef Koudelka is a Czech-French photographer and a member of Magnum Photos. His photographs of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague became international symbols. Gypsies (1975) documents Romani people in Czechoslovakia and across Europe in the 1960s. Exiles (1988) collects the years he spent wandering Europe after leaving his country. Since 1986 he has also worked with a panoramic camera, photographing landscapes marked by people: industrial ruins, ancient ruins, walls and wasted land. These later photographs usually have no people in them at all.

What ties it together is emotion. Desolation and alienation run through his work, yet you often feel a stubborn hope too. The Magnum biography calls him part of "the humanistic and poetic tradition of European photography".

Josef Koudelka was born on 10 January 1938 in Boskovice, a small town in Moravia, Czechoslovakia. He began photographing his family with a 6×6 Bakelite camera. He studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague from 1956, graduated in engineering in 1961 and worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and Bratislava.

Theatre photography

In the 1960s he took commissions from theatre magazines and regularly photographed productions at Prague's Theatre Behind the Gate (Divadlo za branou), the company led by director Otomar Krejča, using a Rolleiflex. Theatre taught him to see gesture and drama. You can feel that stage sense in his street work.

The Gypsies project

From 1962 to 1971 he travelled every summer to photograph Roma communities in Czechoslovakia, including Slovakia, and in Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. He carried a rucksack and slept in the open air, close to the nomadic life he photographed. In 1967 he gave up engineering to be a photographer full time.

Prague, August 1968

He came back from photographing in Romania just two days before the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to crush the Prague Spring. He photographed the invasion in the streets of Prague for a week. His negatives were smuggled out to Magnum and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine, credited only to "P.P." (Prague Photographer), to protect him and his family. In 1969 the Overseas Press Club awarded the "unknown Czech photographer" the Robert Capa Gold Medal. His name was only attached to those pictures publicly years later; a 1984 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London credited him for the first time.

Exile

With Magnum's help he left for England in 1970, during the crackdown that followed the invasion, on a working visa and applied for political asylum. He joined Magnum as an associate in 1971 and became a full member in 1974. For years he wandered Europe with his camera and little else. Henri Cartier-Bresson was a friend and supporter. He became a French citizen in 1987 and could only return to Czechoslovakia in 1990.

Panoramas and later work

Back home he made Black Triangle, panoramic photographs of a wasted industrial landscape at the foot of the Ore Mountains. Chaos (1999) gathered his panoramic landscapes. Wall (2013, Aperture) shows Israel and the West Bank, made for the This Place project organized by photographer Frédéric Brenner. He divides his time between France and Prague.

For the invasion he used an Exakta Varex with a 25mm Flektogon wide-angle lens, loaded with East German movie film, according to most accounts of those days. The same kind of wide setup shaped the intense, close pictures in Gypsies. Later he moved to a Leica with 35mm and 50mm lenses, and for his panoramic landscapes he used panoramic cameras, including a Fuji GX617.

What matters for you is how he used the wide lens. He didn't stand back and fit everything in. He got close, so a face or a hand fills the foreground while the scene around it adds meaning. Wide lenses tilt and stretch things near the edges. He used that tension on purpose to make frames feel unstable and charged.

If you want to try the same look, a 24mm or 28mm equivalent is a good start. My guide to the best lens for street photography compares focal lengths and how close each one forces you to get.

I don't reproduce his photographs here. They're protected, and you can see them at Magnum Photos and the Josef Koudelka Foundation. Look each one up as you read.

Wenceslas Square, Prague, August 1968

An arm with a wristwatch reaches into the foreground. Behind it lies an almost empty square. People had chosen not to gather, so the occupiers would have no reason to shoot. You don't see a single soldier. The watch marks the moment. Koudelka later made it the first picture in Exiles and said it is symbolic of that book. The move: tell a big story with one small, close foreground detail and let the empty space carry the emotion.

The dog in the snow, the cover of Exiles

A black dog on a snowy field in France, alone in a white, desolate space. Many people read it as a portrait of Koudelka himself, rootless and drifting. The move: a single dark shape in a lot of white. It is negative space used for feeling, not decoration.

Gypsies, Jarabina and other villages

The Roma photographs from Slovakia and Romania are packed and close. Faces, hands and bodies crowd the frame, often at strong angles, with deep blacks. Look through the Magnum selection for the frames made in Jarabina, Slovakia. The move: get inside the scene instead of watching from the edge. Emotion comes from proximity.

This exercise borrows Koudelka's approach. It's about feeling first and framing second.

1. Use one wide lens for a month. A 24mm or 28mm equivalent, nothing else. I've written about limitation creativity before: fewer choices push your brain to solve problems with what you have.
2. Pick a group, a place or a ritual you can return to. A market, a church, a fair, a neighborhood. Koudelka went back to the same communities summer after summer.
3. Get close enough that a gesture fills the foreground. A hand or a face. Keep the context behind it.
4. Look for the feeling before the frame. Ask what the scene feels like: grief, joy, tiredness, defiance. Then compose to push that feeling.
5. Edit hard in black and white. Deep blacks and strong contrast suit this kind of picture. Keep only the frames with emotion.

Be respectful. Getting close is not the same as being pushy. My guide on how to photograph strangers covers how to do it calmly, and street photography law varies by country, so check whether street photography is legal where you shoot.

My own street photography is not like Koudelka's. I don't have his decades with one community. But his work taught me that emotion is a separate part of a picture, and you can work on it on purpose.

In the frame above the wide lens and the low angle make the man's effort feel bigger than life. The composition is simple. The emotion is the tension in his body against the sea.

This one has nobody in it, like Koudelka's later landscapes. The tracks and the light carry the mood: departure, distance, going somewhere you can't see yet.

In my teaching I use a framework I call the Eye, Heart and Mind of a photograph. The Heart is the emotional part. For years my own pictures were clean and well composed but had no punch. It was my friend Don Springer who made me see that the Heart part was missing. Koudelka is pure Heart, backed by a strong Eye. For more on this, read what makes a good photograph.

Many street photographers feel their work looks like everyone else's. A lot of that comes from photographing surfaces: people walking in nice light. Koudelka shows another way. Commit to a subject for years and let what you feel about it shape the frame.

He also shows that a photographer can change form. He went from theatre and Roma villages to panoramic landscapes without people. The constant is the intensity. As he put it to Magnum: "The maximum, that is what has always interested me."

In my online street photography course, Phototactic, one module is about putting emotion in your images, alongside composition and the picture patterns that make a frame work. It's a video course. There is no feedback on your own photos, so the commitment part is yours. For more masters, see my list of famous street photographers, and for another take on timing, read about the decisive moment.

His awards include the Prix Nadar (1978), the Grand Prix National de la Photographie, the Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson (1991) and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1992). The Museum of Modern Art gave him a show in 1975. Later exhibitions ran at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York and the Centre Pompidou, which has shown an exhibition on the making of Exiles. If you visit Prague, my Prague street photography guide covers the city where the invasion pictures were made.

His line "The maximum, that is what has always interested me" is in my collection of street photography quotes. More photobooks to study are in my list of the best street photography books.