Curated by Matthew Witkovsky
Josef Koudelka is often called a “street photographer,” a designation that, in light of his variform lifetime production, suggests the limitations and, perhaps, the final exhaustion of the old categories of photographic criticism. The 162 photos in this show, which will include many “vintage” exhibition and work prints, range from 1958 through the present and are drawn primarily from Koudelka’s personal archive. The images encompass several examples of the Czech-born French photographer’s important early work documenting the Prague theater scene, Gypsy encampments, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Among the selections are pictures taken for projects that resulted in one or another of Koudelka’s many books, including Exiles (1988), The Black Triangle (1994), Chaos (1999),and the recently published Wall (2013), consisting of panoramic landscape photographs depicting the barrier separating Israelis from Palestinians.
Travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Nov. 11, 2014–Mar. 29, 2015; Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, Sept.–Nov. 2015.
