PHOTO: Josef Koudelka-Industry

Josef Koudelka believes that the narrative in the photographic series should be sufficient to convey meaning to the viewer. He therefore rarely explains his photographs. Instead he emphasizes the importance of composition and captures only what he needs to destill a detail or expression. Consequently, Koudelka has influenced his own generation of Czech documentary photographers, such Markéta Luskačová, Dagmar Hochová, as well as the next generation, such as Gilad Baram.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo:Pace Gallery Archive

Josef Koudelka in his solo exhibition “Industry” bring together six large-scale panoramas he created between 1987 and 2010 as part of a project titled Industries. The exhibition will also include a display of small-scale, accordion-style maquettes. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1938, Koudelka trained as an aeronautical engineer but began photographing Romani people—their everyday lives, their struggles, and their traditions—mainly in central European countries in the early 1960s, making a full-time commitment to photography later that decade. In 1968, he photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, publishing his works under the initials P.P. (Prague photographer). Koudelka, who was anonymously awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for those photographs, left Czechoslovakia seeking political asylum in England, with assistance from the Magnum Photos cooperative, in 1970. His first book, Gypsies, was released by Aperture in 1975, and he has since produced more than a dozen publications of his work. Koudelka’s interest in the social and political dimensions of photography, evident in his earliest bodies of work, would endure through the following decades. He has been working in large-format, panoramic photography since 1986, capturing images of changing landscapes around the world—places that have been reshaped, altered, and in some cases devastated by the effects of industry, time, and war. Adopting a semi-nomadic lifestyle in pursuit of documenting these haunting, elegiac scenes, Koudelka produced deeply interconnected bodies of work that speak to the ways that the weight of history lingers within the natural world. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the artist photographed the Berlin Wall; the streets of Beirut immediately following the Lebanese Civil War; outsized industrialization and pollution in the Black Triangle, a border region between Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic; the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland; and other places forever transformed by sociopolitical turmoil, violence, and environmental destruction. Also among Koudelka’s famous panoramic projects are his “Ruins” series, for which he photographed more than 200 archeological sites across Greece, Italy, Libya, Syria, and other countries between 1991 and 2015, and his body of work on Israel’s West Bank Wall, which he created over the course of seven trips to Israel and Palestine between 2008 and 2012.

Photo: Josef Koudelka, Azerbaijan, 1999, inkjet print mounted to aluminum, 32-7/8″ × 100-1/16″ (83.5 cm × 254.2 cm), image 36-7/8″ × 104-1/16″ (93.7 cm × 264.3 cm), paper and mount 44-1/8″ × 111-5/16″ × 2-1/4″ (112.1 cm × 282.7 cm × 5.7 cm), frame, © Josef Koudelka, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 29/3-27/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/