In 1968, Josef
Koudelka was a 30-year-old acclaimed theater photographer who had never made
pictures of a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21, when
Warsaw Pact tanks invaded the city of Prague, ending the short-lived political
liberalization in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring. 
Koudelka had returned home the day before from photographing gypsies in Romania. In the
midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, he took a series of
photographs which were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after
they reached New York,
Magnum Photos distributed the images credited to "an unknown Czech
photographer" to avoid reprisals. The intensity and significance of the
images earned the still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award. Sixteen
years would pass before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship. Forty
years after the invasion, this impressive monograph features nearly 250 of
these searing images--most of them published here for the first time--personally
selected by Koudelka from his extensive archive. Interspersed with the images
are press and propaganda quotations from the time, also selected by Koudelka,
alongside a text by three Czech historians. Though the images gathered in this
remarkable publication document a specific historicalevent, their
transformative quality still resonates.
Josef Koudelka has
spent as much as possible of his life as a photographer making pictures of the
Romani (Gypsies) of Eastern Europe. He has
done this not because he was asked to, or because he thought that the world
would be grateful, but because he has found the subject inexhaustibly
fascinating, and perhaps also because Romani seem an endangered species,
unlikely to survive much longer in Eastern Europe
or elsewhere.
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