He was also supported by the Czech art historian Anna Farova. He and his work received support and acknowledgment from his friend the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Koudelka has had many other books of his work published, including in 2006 the retrospective volume Koudelka. Since 1986, he has worked with a panoramic camera and issued a compilation of these photographs in his book Chaos in 1999. Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Observer in 2011, described Gypsies as "a classic of documentary photography". Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Koudelka sustained his work through numerous grants and awards, and continued to exhibit and publish major projects like Gypsies (1975) and Exiles (1988). He continued to wander around Europe with his camera and little else. In 1971 he joined Magnum as an Associate Member and became a Full Member in 1974. With Magnum to recommend him to the British authorities, Koudelka applied for a three-month working visa and fled to England in 1970, where he applied for political asylum and stayed for more than a decade. Many of his photographs of these events were not seen until decades later. In 1969 the "anonymous Czech photographer" was awarded the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Gold Medal for photographs requiring exceptional courage. Koudelka's pictures of the events became dramatic international symbols, and came to be "recognised as one of the most powerful photojournalistic essays of the 20th century". (Prague Photographer) for fear of reprisal to him and his family. Some of Koudelka's negatives were smuggled out of Prague to the Magnum Photos agency, and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine under the initials P. He witnessed and recorded the military forces of the Warsaw Pact as they invaded Prague and crushed reforms of the so-called Prague Spring. He had returned from photographing Romani people in Romania just two days before the Soviet invasion, in August 1968. The Romani led a nomadic lifestyle and each summer Koudelka would travel for the project, "carrying a rucksack and a sleeping bag, sleeping in the open air, and living frugally". īetween 19, Koudelka travelled throughout Czechoslovakia and rural Romania, Hungary, France and Spain photographing Romani people. In 1967, he decided to give up his career in engineering for full-time work as a photographer. Koudelka began taking commissions from theatre magazines, and regularly photographed stage productions at Prague's Theatre Behind the Gate on a Rolleiflex camera. Later he worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and Bratislava. He staged his first photographic exhibition the same year. He studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) in 1956, receiving a degree in engineering in 1961. He began photographing his family and the surroundings with a 6×6 Bakelite camera. Koudelka was born in 1938 in the small Moravian town of Boskovice, Czechoslovakia. Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York the Hayward Gallery, London the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He is a member of Magnum Photos and has won awards such as the Prix Nadar (1978), a Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989), a Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson (1991), and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1992). Josef Koudelka (born 10 January 1938) is a Czech-French photographer.
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