Koudelka

Revealing the breadth of Josef Koudelka's artistic achievement, this lavish collection gathers over 150 of the photographer's major works in one volume for the first time. Born in 1938 in Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), Koudelka grew up behind the Iron Curtain and trained to be an aeronautical engineer. His early images, including production stills for a Czech repertory theater company and tense shots of the Soviet invasion of Prague demonstrate the rigorous compositional eye, taste for the theatrical and otherworldly strangeness that define his work. The pictures are always accessible, but Koudelka's arrangements and printing style push much of his work toward somber dreaminess. (Some of the brief monographs interspersed with the pictures are informative; others are filled with pretentious jargon.) After his exile from Czechoslovakia in 1970, he quickly found a home at the renowned Magnum agency with the support of Cartier-Bresson. In Koudelka's subsequent work—a series on Gypsies; stunning, nearly abstract landscapes; the shipping of a colossal Lenin statue through the Balkans—he remains a poet with a lens, capturing a deeply personal vision while documenting the real world. This collection confirms Koudelka's status as one of the most versatile and singular age-makers in contemporary photography. (Mar.)