Josef Koudelka: Diaries
Drawn from sixty-nine notebooks accumulated over more than five decades, Josef Koudelka: Diaries grants readers intimate access to the inner world and working methods of the legendary Czech photographer — a restless exile whose life’s work spans defining portraits of Roma communities, firsthand documentation of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague, and haunting studies of industrial devastation across the landscape.
The volume carries a striking sense of immediacy through facsimile reproductions of diary pages alongside photographs by Koudelka himself, including self-portraits. As curator Tomáš Pospěch observes, the diaries function as a kind of “cookbook” of classical photography: a record of encounters with the medium’s greatest practitioners, reflections on the fast-disappearing craft of analog black-and-white work, and a recurring cycle of resolutions, self-imposed rules, anecdotes, and dreams revisited across the years. Together they map not only a photographic philosophy but a way of living. Diaries makes an ideal companion volume to Josef Koudelka: Next (2023), the visual biography authored by Melissa Harris.
About the Author
Josef Koudelka was born on January 10, 1938, in Boskovice, Moravia, then part of Czechoslovakia. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1961, and initially pursued a career in that field while photographing as an active amateur. He began photographing Roma communities in his spare time around 1962, before committing to photography full-time in the late 1960s.
In 1968, Koudelka documented the Soviet-led invasion of Prague, publishing his photographs under the initials “P.P.” (Prague Photographer) to protect his identity. In 1969, he was anonymously awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for that work. He left Czechoslovakia seeking political asylum in 1970. He moved to England, where he joined the Magnum Photos agency. He was naturalized as a French citizen in 1987.
His awards include the Prix Nadar (1978), the Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989), the Grand Prix Henri Cartier-Bresson (1991), and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1992). Major exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography in New York, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
