JOSEF KOUDELKA – INVASION 68 : PRAGUE
2011-07-04In 1968 Josef Koudelka was thirty years old. He had committed himself to photography as a full-time career only recently, and had been chronicling the theater and the lives of gypsies, but he had never photographed a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21, when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded the city of Prague, ending the short-lived political freedom in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring.
In the midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, Koudelka took to the streets to document this critical moment.
Koudelka’s photographs of the invasion were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after they reached New York, Magnum Photos distributed the images, but credited them to an unknown Czech photographer to avoid reprisals. The intensity and significance of the images earned the still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award.
Sixteen years would pass before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship.
Exhibition runs through to July 18th, 2011
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Yebisu Garden Place
1-13-3 Mita Meguro-ku
Tokyo 1530062
Japan
