Josef Koudelka: Formed by the World

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Josef Koudelka started his professional life as an engineer in Czechoslovakia and switched to photography in his late 20s. He photographed the Soviet invasion of his country in 1968 and published his seminal book, “Gypsies,” in 1975 (a revised and enlarged edition was published by Aperture in 2011).

His new book, “Wall: Israeli and Palestinian Landscapes,” also published by Aperture, is a result of four years of photographing the Israeli-built wall that separates the Palestinian West Bank and Israel. The book came out of a group project, “This Place: Making Images, Breaking Images â€" Israel and the West Bank,” that was organized by the photographer Frédéric Brenner and included Mr. Koudelka and 11 other photographers.

Mr. Koudelka, 75, has been a member of Magnum Photos for more than 40 years. He spoke with James Estrin in Paris last week. The conversation has been edited and will run in two parts on Lens, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Q.

We met last time in Charlottesville, at Look3.

A.

I try to do a minimum of interviews and usually I do an interview because I am having a show and I know I have to. Usually it lasts a long time. I don’t want to do it quickly, but I want to do it thoroughly.

Whatever I do, essentially, I do for myself. I didn’t do “Gypsies” to save Gypsies, because even I know I can’t save them. So everything I do for myself. If it helps something, I am very pleased. I go around the world and try to discover what interests me and what has something to do with me. For that reason, I never work for a magazine, I never did any fashion, I never made any publicity. For me, a project must interest me and have something to do with me.

So when this group project came up, I said no, I don’t want to participate. First of all, I don’t want to get mixed up with Israel because it’s very, very complicated and it was not exactly my idea. Secondly, it was a group project and I am very suspicious of group projects because you can control what you do, but you can’t control what the others do.

So, I refused to go there.

Frédéric Brenner pushed me to go. He said go for two weeks and have a look. I said I will go on the condition that I pay for my own ticket because I know that I am going to tell you no. I know him very well, since he started to take pictures, and I like him and I think he’s an honest man.

I had never been in Israel, and I wanted to know what Israel was about, so I said O.K. And I discovered that it has something to do with me.

For 25 years, and this is my longest photographic project, I have been interested in how contemporary man influences the landscape. I have made 10 books on it.

Then I discovered the wall. I grew up behind a wall so I knew what it was. For me, the good photographer is not the guy who goes on the street for 10 minutes and takes this fantastic picture. The good photographer must create the conditions so that he can be good. I found that the destruction of the landscape is very bad. This is the landscape that had something to do with me.

I didn’t really want to get mixed up with this, so I needed to have the guarantee that they would let me do what I wanted. Only after four trips of three weeks each to Israel was I sure that I have the guarantee that I am not going to be used â€" that I will be given the freedom to do all that I wanted in Israel. And that I can control it, from the beginning to the final product. Only then did I sign the contract.

This was going to be a book and I was going to pick the publisher. If you look at only three of the photos you might not understand what it is all about. The question for me was if I do an exhibition should there be text. I don’t need text. There will be a short text in the back like in “Black Triangle.”

Andrew Henderson/The New York Times Josef Koudelka standing in front of his exhibition “Invasion 68 Prague,” at Aperture Gallery in Manhattan.

Q.

You don’t want words because when people think of the wall it’s about politics? The wall also has this significance, for you, of living behind the wall in Czechoslovakia.

A.

What is interesting for me is that I showed these books in Israel and everyone told me this book is not a political book â€" that this is about man and the place. This book is not about conflict â€" of course you can take it as you want.

An Israeli poet said to me, “You did something important â€" you made the invisible visible.” He meant that Israelis don’t want to see the wall and they don’t even want to speak about it. They don’t go across it. It is very easy to live in one country, in France or Czechoslovakia, and ignore completely one thing, one important thing, that you want to ignore.

Q.

The thing that struck me when thinking about the book and thinking about you is that you photograph people who are rootless. In “Exiles” they are people who had to leave home. Gypsies don’t have a home or their home may be the next place they go to. To some Palestinians the wall is keeping them from their home.

A.

I was brought up behind the wall and all my life I wanted to get out, and this is the principle of the wall â€" you know you can’t get out.

Q.

So it’s not just a physical wall?

A.

Of course it is a physical wall. I hope my book is not about my experience. In my “Black Triangle” book, I am not an ecologist though I am very happy if it is used to help the land. The viewer can take something else out of it.

I don’t like picture stories. In fact I think picture stories destroyed all photography. You needed to have a close-up and you needed to do other things and for me I am interested in one picture that tells many different stories to different people. That is to me a sign of the good picture.

We all see through our experiences. So because of my experiences, essentially the wall is about not being able to go to the other side.

Every day that I was there I didn’t see anything else but the wall, and I can tell you I couldn’t stand it longer than three weeks. I was so depressed that I needed to go away.

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, “Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer.” I have the camera’s viewfinder and I am trying to put the world â€" for the world â€" in the viewfinder. But in the same time the world is forming me.

Q.

You didn’t do assignment work because you didn’t want other people to control what you do or tell you how to do it.

A.

I did 25 or 26 dummies of the book. The work is done only after 1,000 possibilities you come to the one that must be done this way and not differently.

Q.

It seems like it is of a whole. You said the wall fits in your search for individual freedom when you were younger. Which is …

A.

I think it is not only about the wall, my book is about the wall and the Israel and Palestinian landscape. You have this divided country and these people who react certain ways to these conditions.

For me, Palestinian or Israeli, I look at you for who you are. When I left Czechoslovakia people asked me: “Are you a Communist? Are you opposed to communism? Are you an anarchist?” How you label it doesn’t mean much to me.

We have a divided country and each of two groups of people tries to defend themselves. The one that can’t defend itself is the landscape. I call what is going on in this most holy landscape, which is most holy for a big part of humanity, is the crime against the landscape. As there exists crimes against humanity there should exist the crime against the landscape.

I am principally against destruction â€" and what’s going on is a crime against the landscape that is enormous in one of the most important landscapes in the world.

Q.

You said that you photograph for yourself â€" it’s nice if other people see other things in your pictures but you photograph for yourself. I’ve come to realize that for me photographing is really about the process â€" the product will take care of itself. The photograph will come out right if the process is right.

A.

I was never really interested in publishing my photographs. I was never interested, but now I am changing.

In the past if somebody had come to me and said, “I’ll give you money to photograph on the condition that you will not publish your photographs,” I would have accepted without any question. But if he would say, “I want to destroy your photographs,” I would have said no. For me the essence is important.

Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos Romania. 1968. Gypsies.

I am not this guy who wants to change the world â€" of course I would be happy if it helped. But I remember when I published my Gypsy book I felt like a prostitute because suddenly anyone who has money could buy it.

I wanted to choose the people who I wanted to show the photographs to. This was a deformation from Czechoslovakia because I knew that my photographs didn’t have importance there.

(He laughs.) I couldn’t help my Gypsies. If I was only going to be photographing Gypsies I was going to run into problems from the government, because they didn’t want much talk about the Gypsies.

I have this deformation, from this Czech period when I was growing up, in many different ways. It goes even to the language. I don’t believe what people say. What was written or what you heard â€" the contrary was true.

For me what photographers say about their photos doesn’t have any importance. For me it is just enough to look at the pictures. Many times â€" for the boring pictures â€" people have to say so many things about them to show you there is something to them when many times there is nothing.

Q.

So if you do this for yourself, what is the satisfaction then? You do it for yourself just to see these things that you want to see?

A.

I told you that I am changing. Of course I don’t have any illusion about this book that it will change anything. I am just showing what I saw. That’s all.

Q.

What I am wondering, is it the aesthetic pleasure â€" the artistic pleasure of putting something together?

A.

I never use the explanation of “art,” as a matter of fact every time there is the Magnum meeting and they start to talk about art I say: “Can we eliminate from the annual meeting the word art? Let’s just talk about photography. What is this art?”

Part 2 of the interview with Josef Koudelka is currently published on Lens.

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