Koudelka is my favourite photographer at the moment too. My favourite books of his are Exiles, Gypsies and the Black Triangle (all of which are out of print, you’ll have to trawl through various second hand sources for them). I’ll let his images speak for themselves, only to say that if you can’t “get” them, I feel just a little sorry for you
😛
If you want to look at his photos online, the best source is of course
Magnum. There is also the
Wikipedia entry, the
About.com entry and a really interesting article about him in
CAMERA magazine.
As you may already know, for many years he has wandered around Europe without a more defined base than the floors of the Magnum office. Exiles really is the book that documents these wanderings, you can see several images that depict his stateless nature
here,
here and
here. I’ve a couple of friends that have worked in the New York offices of Magnum who’ve met him. They described him as someone who was initially a little shy but soon opened up to be extremely warm. He seems to be a guy without pretence, he would make a point of hanging out with the lowliest of unpaid interns. They all mention the drinking stories:
“Koudelka was awesome though. I first met him one morning when he busted up into the Magnum office after just rolling into NYC from Paris. He was wielding a bottle of Stoli and made us all stop working, and drink with him. After all, he was our boss as Magnum is a co-op.”
“I did a shot with him a couple of times. Really fun guy. By shot I mean whiskey. By whiskey I mean taking a pull from the bottle he shoved in my face.”
From what they told me, he would wander for months at a time before returning to civilisation to process and get contacts for hundreds of rolls shot during that time. These days (once again according to my friends) his print sales are more than sufficient to fund his wandering.
I had my personal encounter with Koudelka in Sicily over Easter this year, where he was photographing the religious festivities in the town of Trapani. Over the photographic grapevine, we had heard that he was in town: “Koudelka is here… Koudelka is here”, but for a couple days there was no sign of him. I was wandering the streets at around 6 am on Easter Saturday hunting for a good shot, when suddenly a tall, rumpled man with long, white hair brushed past me and vanished into the crowd. I had never seen a picture of the man, but I instantly knew it was him. Not for the fact that he was toting a battered Leica, but because of the way he moved, with the ghost-like elegance and speed of a photographer who’s been able to get some of the shots that he has.
I next ran into him about ten minutes later. Dawn was breaking. He was sitting on a sea wall, looking out north into the Mediterranean. He bathed in golden orange light, scribbling furiously into a notebook as he watched the sun rise over the ocean. There was a hubbub of activity right behind him, but he studiously ignored everything. The guy seemed totally calm and at peace with himself.
The next time I ran into him was a couple of hours later inside a large church. Every so often, photographers would come up to him and shake his hand (including myself). It was really quite hilarious to watch, there he was almost holding court with his many admirers. What was more interesting was the way he worked. While other photographers were dashing around photographing at a rapid clip, he paced slowly around the church. Actually, it was more like strolled, with his hands behind his back, just wandering around, looking. I barely saw him take a shot, but when he did suddenly he would quicken his pace, move rapidly into the position he wanted as he pre-focused his lens. Then bang and bang and he was done and back to stalking/ambling around with his hands again behind his back. He knew _exactly_ what he wanted to photograph and to me he looked like a serene Zen master as he went about doing it. I don’t think he could have taken more than a couple of rolls in those two hours.
For the equipment junkies, he was using a battered black Leica. My friend in Magnum says he uses an older pre-aspherical 35mm Summilux. I also saw him use what appeared to be a black Olympus OM.
Anyway, I’ve written enough, but I’ll end with two photographs. One is a crappy one I got of him inside the church. The other is something I took a couple of minutes after I saw him watching the sun rise on the sea wall; I like to think that the random encounter helped inspire me to get this one.
