The striking, timeless images of a wandering world photographer

Retrospective exhibition on Josef Koudelka runs to November 23 at Benaki’s Pireos St annex

MARGARITA POURNARA

Josef Koudelka’s photographs are fragments of a world that is about to become extinct.

“It becomes harder and harder for me to take photographs,” he admitted at a recent press conference at the Benaki Museum’s Pireos Street annex, where a retrospective of his work is currently on display.

This is hardly surprising. The people he portrays seem to be living in a sphere of their own, detached from space and time. Even his pictures of the invasion of Prague by Soviet troops in August 1968 seem to be less documentation and more of an existentialist quest. “I didn’t see Czechs and Russians, I just saw people holding weapons against those who didn’t have any,” he said.

The tribute at the Benaki, which opened earlier this week and runs to November 23, features 300 photographs divided into various units. The display takes visitors on a journey through the career of the photographer, from his early steps as a student to his panoramic takes of the 1990s. The Benaki Museum hosts all those images that have rightfully gained him international standing: his monumental projects “Gypsies,” “Exiles” and “Chaos” as well as his work on the theater and the Prague invasion. Clearly, he is one of the greatest photographers of the present, gifted with the kind of penetrating eye that helps his work withstand the test of time.

What is particularly striking, especially for those not familiar with photography, is that Koudelka’s subjects seem to experience feelings in a way quite different from us today. In his series on the Gypsies, or Roma, for instance, one detects, with great clarity, feelings of happiness, sadness, fear, mourning, celebration, hunger and desperation.

Koudelka is nationless. Having left the former Czechoslovakia in 1968, he traveled around the world, sleeping in the countryside and has refused to pay for a roof over his head for the past 30 years. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Roma believed him to be a fellow Gypsy, how else could he have captured their world the way he has?

The exhibition takes place in collaboration with the Apeiron and the Magnum photography agencies, with the support of the French Embassy, the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the French Institute.

Benaki Museum Pireos Street Annex, 138 Pireos & Andronikou, tel 210.345.3111.