Josef Koudelka was
born in 1938 in Boskovice, Moravia, town of about 10,000 inhabitants.
He began photographing his family and the surroundings with a 6 x 6
Bakelite camera. In 1961, he earned a degree from the University of
Technology in Prague (CVUT), staging his first photographic exhibition
the same year. Later he worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and
Bratislava.
He had
returned from a project shooting gypsies in Romania just two days before
the Soviet invasion, in August 1968. He witnessed and recorded the
military forces of the Warsaw Pact as they invaded Prague and crushed
the Czech reforms. Koudelka's negatives were smuggled out of Prague into
the hands of the Magnum agency, and published anonymously in The Sunday
Times Magazine under the initials P. P. (Prague Photographer) for fear
of reprisal to him and his family.
