Josef Koudelka: The 1968 Prague Invasion

The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 concerned my life directly. It was my country. I took these photographs for myself, not for a magazine. It was only by chance that they were published. I wasn’t a reporter. I had never photographed anything that you would call ‘news’. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was confronted with that kind of situation. I responded to it. I knew it was important to photograph, so I photographed. I didn’t think much about what I was doing.

He offered to take them to America, where he had been invited by Arthur Miller. but then he was not allowed to go. Several photographs were taken out of the country by Eugene Ostroff, curator of the photography department at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, who had been visiting Prague. In New York he showed them to his friend, the photographer Elliott Erwitt, who was then president of the Magnum photo agency and also a friend of Fárová. Erwitt wanted to know whether there were other photographs apart from the ones he send seen, and whether I would be willing to send the negatives to Magnum.

I wasn’t too keen to do that but Fárová assured me that I didn’t need to worry — this was a serious organization. In the end, the negatives got safely out of the country and arrived in New York. Magnum supervised the printing of the photographs and their distribution all over the world. They had to be published without my name and were prepared for publication in leading magazines of many countries to commemorate the first anniversary of the Russian invasion in August 1969. At the same time photographs were also assembled by Erwitt as a news clip for television.

I think the series of my photographs of the Russian invasion are important as a historical document, it shows what really happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968. But perhaps a few of the photographs — the best ones — are something more. They are the ones where it’s not important who’s Czech and who’s Russian, the ones where the important thing is that one person has a gun and the other hasn’t. And the one who hasn’t is, in fact, the stronger.

In August 1969 I was in London with the Prague-based Theatre Behind the Gate, which was giving guest performances there. It was a Sunday morning. The photographs came out in the Sunday Times magazine, the supplement of a large newspaper in Britain. Members of the theatre company showed the magazine to each other. It was a strange feeling to see my photographs published and not to be able to tell anyone they were mine.  

Later, during my stay in London I managed to get in touch with Erwitt in New York. We decided that Magnum should send a letter offering me a grant for three months to photograp gypsies in western Europe. After I had returned to Prague and the letter had arrived, I managed to put together all the necessary letters of recommendation. Then, a friend at the Czechoslovak Ministry of Culture helped me to obtain a passport with permission to stay abroad for 80 days. I left Czechoslovakia in May 1970. I wanted to see all the places where gypsies gather.

I began in the South of France at the gypsy pilgrimage in Les Saintes Maries de la Mer. From there, I went to the Epsom horse races near London, then to the Appleby horse fair on the Scottish border, and then to Ireland. When I passed through Paris, I visited the Magnum office. There they told me that, although my photographs were published without my name, it would not be difficult for the Czech police to find out who the photographer was. They advised me not to return to Prague. I decided to stay in England. In order to avoid reprisals against my family Magnum continued to distribute my photographs of the 1968 invasion without mentioning my name. Only after the death of my father did I admit that they were mine. It was on the occasion of my first big exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, in 1984, which was curated by Robert Delpire and organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain.