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Lens on Tuesday published the first installment of a two-part interview with the legendary Czech photographer Josef Koudelka. He is perhaps best known for his photographs of the Soviet invasion of his country in 1968 and his seminal book, “Gypsies.†His new book, “Wall: Israeli and Palestinian Landscapes,†published by Aperture, is a result of four years of photographing the Israeli-built wall separating Israel and Palestinian West Bank. 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.
Outside of photography, who or what are your influences?
Listen, I have never had any hero in my life or in photography. I just travel, I look and everything influences me. Everything influences me. I am quite different now than I was 40 years ago. For 40 years I have been traveling. I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.
I became what I am from how I was born, but also what photography made from me. Other people ask me, “Are you still Czech or are you French?†I don’t know who I am â€" people who see me might say who I am. I am the product of all this continuous traveling, but I know where I come from.
It is not my village where I was born, but a few kilometers to the south which is South Moravia, because there is the best songs and the best music there. If these songs and the music came from this land, then I have to have come from there too.
You have said that you don’t like to plan. (He shows a highly detailed color coded calendar and notebook.) Wow!
So I plan. I plan. I know where I want to go and I know what I want to do. At the same time I like to be open enough to forget it. For me, the trip is essential.
I don’t know that much about engineering, but I am wondering how much that affected your photography. Are there any similarities? Or is that something you left behind?
I am very happy that I finished being an engineer. I love airplanes as much as photography, but after doing the profession for seven years I realized what I can do and what I can’t do. I realized what sort of an engineer I am, and I didn’t have the aspiration to become the big boss of something. And I started photographing. I was 30 years old and I realized that I didn’t want to die when I was 30 years old. I wanted to go farther.
I am still trying to find how far I can go in photography. I realize the limitations. Most photographers die when they are 40 years old. I might be dead myself by now. That’s for other people to say. But I am still interested in taking photographs and I am still interested in life. I am still going on because I don’t put so many limitations on myself.
Take for example Bresson and Klein. As Henri started, he finished. With the exception that at the beginning he was the best. He still took some excellent photographs. And Klein used the wide-angle lens throughout his life.
When I was in Prague, I photographed the Gypsies with an Exacta camera and a 25-millimeter Flektogon f4 lens. I shot inside mostly at a 30th of a second or less. I bulk-loaded this East German 400 ASA movie film - and pushed it as far as it could go in a hot developer. Sometimes I left it in overnight. Sometimes to 3200 ASA.
There was such a density of negative that when I made my first exhibition of the Gypsies I made a second set and made a copy negative of it so everything that was in the Magnum archive was printed from the copy negative.
When I understood that I don’t need any more wide-angle lens photos - that on the contrary there’s a repetition coming - I bought two Leicas and started to use a 35-millimeter lens and a 50-millimeter lens. I knew that the techniques will change the vision â€" if you change the technique.
I think it is also the training from Czechoslovakia that I appreciate the freedom. You want to keep this feeling of freedom, and you want to go farther, so you break the rule, you destroy the house, and you start again.
Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos Czechoslovakia. Kladno. 1966. I think one of the things that I loved about photography when I started was that you do it by yourself.
That’s exactly the case. You buy your camera, and you buy your film, and everything is on you. This is the freedom photography gives you, but it is also a big challenge because you have to handle it.
Also photography is always different. Every time you move to another country you are reborn. You are seeing something else.
That’s what I say. The writer Bruce Chatwin, in a book about aborigines in Australia, called “The Songlines,†says there are a few rules so that aboriginals can survive in a hostile country. The first was to stay in one place means suicide. Second, your country is the place where you don’t put questions to yourself anymore. Your home is the place where you leave from and in a period of crisis you must formulate a way to escape. Also, you should keep good relationships with your neighbors.
You were talking about the format of the camera influencing you. You’ve been shooting digital sometimes. How does that influence you?
For me, the eye is important. Of course, the technique you use can influence you.
For example, shooting this panorama film camera complicates my life enormously because you have four frames on 120 film and in one day you shoot 20 rolls and that’s already $200. So you must have somebody who gives money and then they expect that you finish something.
I was using this Fuji panoramic â€" but the problem was everyone stopped developing the film. You can’t get 220 film anymore and you needed to carry about 35 kilograms extra. I went to Leica and they did one camera for me that was digital panoramic, which is this S2 camera, and they make two lines and set it on black and white. I made four trips with it together with the film camera. In the last two trips I realized I was taking more pictures with this Leica and I am enjoying it more. The result is very comparable. The lens was exactly the same.
The principal difference is first of all you don’t have to carry the film, and you don’t need to process it and you don’t have to carry all the weight and you don’t have to find the money. The digital is much more precise and I have more control of the focus, the depth of the focus, and I can photograph much closer. It gives me more possibilities.
Magnum Photos The photographer Josef Koudelka. 1974.Other than the practical elements of carrying and developing film, was there any difference between digital and film?
For me it is the same. Only I enjoy digital more. I don’t carry a computer. I come inside in the evening, and until 12 o’clock I look at the screen on the back of the camera, and I eliminate.
Landscape photography is fantastic. It’s not by chance that as they get older many photographers start with the landscape. There are certain things you have to do to photograph people â€" you have to be able to run. If you photograph people, all of the time you are running after something and you are losing all the time. With landscapes you are waiting all the time. It’s much more relaxing.
I’m 75 now so for that reason â€" discovering digital landscapes at 75 â€" I am saying, “Viva la revolucion.â€
I want to show you this little book I bought 20 years ago in Czechoslovakia. It is the speech of Chief Seattle to the president of the United States in 1854. It is so beautiful. It applies to Israel.
He says the land doesn’t belong to the people â€" it is the people who belong to the land.  The land is the mother and what is happening to the mother is going to happen to the son too. This is the question about selling the land. He said how can you sell your mother â€" how can you sell the air â€" and he said if you are spitting on your land you are spitting on your mother.
What are you working on now?
I have a project on archaeological sites that I have been working on since 1991. I have visited more than 200 Greek and Roman sites in 19 countries and have three more years left. This year I exhibited it in Marseille, and the problem is that all of the money from it went to the film and to produce it. I did not make one centime.
But now with the digital camera I have the possibility that I can just pay my ticket and pick up the camera and go where I want. I have friends everywhere who let me stay with them. So I have three years more and then I want to make a really important exhibition and two books. One will be a book with text.
Since the beginning of photography everybody has photographed these places, but nobody has ever visited almost all of them.
What did you learn from visiting all these places and spending all this time thinking about the archaeology sites and the history of man?
That nothing is permanent.
Nothing is permanent â€" that’s also what I learned from the Gypsies. Bresson used to tell me that your problem is that you don’t think about the future, and that’s exactly what I learned from the Gypsies. Not to worry much about the future. And I learned that to be alive I don’t need much. So I never worried about money because I knew in the past if I needed the money I borrowed it so I didn’t lose the time.
And time is the only thing you have in your life, and if you are getting older you feel it a little more. But I felt that all my life.
I know you don’t like doing interviews and I understand why you think talking about photography is often banal.
Now I have to make this interview regarding Israel and the wall and that’s where a good journalist can help you. To put a question to force you to answer â€" so you have the time to think about it.
When I was planning to go to Israel, Frédéric [Brenner] prepared for me meetings with philosophers and rabbis and I said: “Listen, I went through all this in Communist Czechoslovakia. Before going to Yugoslavia, they said you have to learn what you are going to see.â€
I said I get my knowledge through my eyes and if you look enough and give enough time, even if you do not have a fantastic brain, which I don’t think much about my brain, you will get to certain conclusions and I think I get to the conclusions. I didn’t want to talk to anybody before going there.
I am grateful to Frédéric Brenner that he pushed me to do it though because it made me richer as a human being.
The wall itself is incredibly ugly. There is nothing aesthetically pleasing about it.
I can imagine that somebody who is in engineering when he sees this wall might say this is really good engineering. I like airplanes and I am very emotional, but some of these war planes are pretty, beautiful, yet they are so terrible.  I think that’s the conflict.
Beauty is very relative and it depends on each person and the beauty is everywhere and the beauty is even in the tragedy.
Part 1 of the interview with Josef Koudelka was published Tuesday on Lens.
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