Koudelka Theatre

'Moving among the actors on set, I was able to take the same scene, multiple times, but differently. It taught me how to get the most out of a given situation, and I have continued to apply this method to my work.' - Josef Koudelka

In his own words, Josef Koudelka was not particularly interested in theatre in his youth. When he arrived in Prague from his Moravian village in the late 1950s, his focus was on his studies. His interests were airplanes, folk music and photography, which he practised as an amateur. A classmate recommended that he meet his uncle, who worked in the editorial staff of the magazine Divadlo (Theatre), then looking for a photographer.

It was in this context that Josef Koudelka, soon to become an aeronautical engineer by profession, became a theatre photographer. In the 1960s, Prague theatres were one of the rare places in Soviet Czechoslovakia where relative freedom of expression continued. Following the Prague Spring (1968), these stages were forced to close, and their animators dissented or left the country.

There is a rich correlation of levels between Koudelka’s theatrical photography and his later way of conceiving his images as a reflection on the theatre of the world. Everything that we know of his practice of the image can be found from his beginnings in the work he did in Prague in the 1960s: his attention to graphic composition, his ease of working in tight spaces among people in movement and in difficult lighting situations, his obsession with returning again and again to the same motif, the same gestures and rituals.

About the Author

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1938, Josef Koudelka began a career as an aeronautical engineer before devoting himself to photography fulltime in the late 1960s. In 1968, he photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, which earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1969. Koudelka left his country in 1970 becoming stateless, and soon after joined the Magnum agency. His first book Gypsies was published by Robert Delpire with Aperture in 1975. Delpire organized several exhibitions of Koudelka’s work beginning with his own gallery on the rue de l’Abbaye and subsequently published several more books including Exiles and Chaos. The photographer’s work has been crowned with numerous prizes, such as the Nadar Prize (1978) for Gitans : La fin du voyage (finally published in French by Delpire in 1977), the National Grand Prize for Photography (1989), the Cartier-Bresson Grand Prize (1991), Hasselblad (1992), and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award. His work has been exhibited around the world. In 2012, Koudelka was promoted to the rank of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.