It’s a hefty volume of more than 350 pages, and it took Melissa Harris over 10 years to produce it. It is also the only biography — which is by no means a hagiography — of an essential photographer who has always remained secretive and who has granted only a few interviews on the occasion of book publications or exhibitions. In these interviews, he talks about his work, about photography, but never about himself. As secretive as he is celebrated, Josef Koudelka doesn’t like to confide, and he fully assumes this position: “My life was for me; it was my business. My work, however, is for everyone. I have always wanted to separate my life from my work, even though I know today that my life and my work are one and the same.”
Melissa Harris, who worked as Editor-in-Chief at Aperture magazine and works now as Editor-at-Large for the Aperture Foundation, enjoys writing biographies. She has written the forthcoming biography of Michael “Nick” Nichols and knows Koudelka, having interviewed him for the magazine and curated his New York exhibition on the 1968 invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact troops. This is one of the reasons Koudelka agreed to the publication of the book Josef Koudelka Next, published by Delpire in France and Aperture in the United States. But the primary reason is elsewhere: “I also accepted because I know that memory is something fragile, something that is not necessarily true.”
For 10 years, the two spoke extensively. Melissa Harris accompanied Josef Koudelka to Prague, where she met his friends, both childhood and recent, and collected their remarks and memories. The photographer opened his personal archives to her, including his notebooks detailing a schedule entirely dedicated to photography, with some pages highlighted in different colors reproduced in the book. The biography is richly illustrated, with numerous small images that seem to come from a family album. Koudelka participated in the design of the illustration: “Before my photos, we discussed the choice of the cover, and Irving Penn’s portrait was the obvious choice. For the opening, I wanted the image Henri Cartier-Bresson took of me walking in 1972. Then Melissa wanted a kind of quick chronological summary on a double page. I selected my most important photos, from abstractions and theater to the very graphic panoramic images in Northern France in 1989, of course including the gypsies and Prague 1968. I also wanted a panoramic shot of Slovakia from 1958 and a recent portrait by Antoine d’Agata. That was my proposal, and we discussed all of this with the designer.”
Josef Koudelka continues: “After this quick biography in images, I wanted to include in each part of the book photographs that I consider important in my journey, and which might be less known. Then, the selection of photos, which serve as illustrations, was done according to the way Melissa organized her text. And there’s a bit of everything: family photos, souvenir photos taken by friends, sometimes we no longer know by whom, many photos of photographers and moments at Magnum, documents like my notebooks, and a few of my photos. It’s not a photo book, but there are still many photos.”
We obviously learn a lot about his childhood in a small village in what was then Czechoslovakia. This was during the German occupation. Born in January 1938, he has memories of that time: “During the occupation, once we were forced to let a passing Nazi officer sleep at the house. The next morning, I found a slide he had lost. It was the first color photo I had ever seen. Then, in 1945, when the Russians arrived to liberate my village, they organized a screening. It was the first film I had ever seen. When the Germans left, driven out by the Russians, they abandoned everything. Among other things, they left weapons, and once I approached three grenades to play with them. I didn’t know what they were. My father was very angry.”
His engineering education, his passion for photography that led him to photograph gypsies and meet Anna Fárová, the invasion of 1968, then his exile to the West, his encounter with Cartier-Bresson and later Robert Delpire, his entry into Magnum, where he remained a fiercely independent figure, the exhibitions, the books — including some with Xavier Barral — the timeline unfolds powerfully and details a life fully dedicated to photography. Koudelka makes it clear that he did not intervene in the content: “I accepted everything. I forbade myself from correcting or judging anything. This is my biography written by Melissa Harris, and this time there are no mistakes. But I didn’t censor anything; I just corrected facts and dates. I never modified anything said by my children or my former wives, for example. I was very transparent; I had nothing to hide. I can’t say that I agree with everything she says, but I didn’t change anything.” Thus, it is a thorough biography, as Americans know how to write, with their long tradition in the genre.
However, Koudelka, who has donated prints to many institutions in countries that welcomed him and who opened his foundation in Prague, insists that this is not an autobiography: “I don’t consider this an autobiography. The idea and structure are Melissa’s, and she did her work by collecting information and testimonies, as well as adding her commentary. That’s why it took 10 years, and she spent more time with me than with others. After that, I intervened in the structure, combining photos with text. This did not simplify things. Melissa wanted the illustrations to be as close as possible to the part of the text where they are mentioned, to ensure everything corresponded. It’s also not easy to produce co-editions because the layout needs to be adjusted depending on the text length, which varies by language.”
“The real autobiography is the publication of my notebooks,” adds Josef Koudelka. “In fact, I wrote them in Czech for myself, convinced that no one would ever read them… I wanted to destroy them because they concerned me and my private life. But when Michel Frizot used excerpts from my notebooks for his text for La Fabrique d’Exils, I realized they could be of interest. Then Melissa became interested, and with my English, I translated some parts from Czech for her. Later, a friend in Prague suggested reading them and proposed a selection he thought was the most interesting. We made a book with the publisher Torst. It was a success, with 3,000 copies sold out. It was reprinted, and it’s mainly young people who buy it. Now it will be translated into English by Aperture. So, there will be both a biography and an autobiography. Complementary.”
Josef Koudelka Next, by Melissa Harris, is available from Delpire and co for 42 € and from Aperture for $35.
