Compelling and brilliant new work by Josef Koudelka
Josef Koudelka was born in Moravia in 1938. In 1968, he
photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, for which he was
awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal. He has
published over a dozen
books, including Exiles, Chaos and Invasion 68: Prague.
The vistas are resolutely grim, and Koudelka makes no attempt to
aestheticize them, yet his sweeping photos are overwhelming. The
moral chasm that opens between the sheer impact of the visual and
knowledge of what is being depicted is fully intended: an
invitation to consider, rather than to simply turn the page in
horror and sadness. – The New York Times
Here he has produced a remarkable collection of panoramic photos
(each 29-by-10-inch spread is a single picture) of the barrier that
has been erected over the past decade in defiance of the
internationally recognized border. – The New York Times
Josef Koudelka's Wall is not a neutral assessment of Israel's
construction of a 430-mile barrier separating Israel from the West
Bank. His panoramic, black-and-white photographs of the structure
and other significant landmarks, made between 2008 and 2012, are
disorienting and brutal, utilizing motion blur, angled horizons and
perspectives—ranging from expansive to intensely close-up—to
contemplate the barrier's material and psychological effects. The
captions for the images and other texts, written by researcher and
writer Ray Dolphin, by and large focus on the questionable route of
the wall and the hardships it's imposed on West Bank Palestinians.
– PDN
Individually, these photographs of the 'security fence' (as
Israelis call it) or the apartheid wall (as it is known by the
Palestinians whose lives and landscape are blighted by it) have a
stark and spectacular beauty. Taken together they create a daunting
feeling of visual incarceration so intense, on a scale so massive,
that the sky itself is—by turns—implicated, outraged. – Geoff Dyer,
Time
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