“Ruins are not the past, but the future”: ‘Ruins’ exhibition of celebrated photographer Josef Koudelka opens in Prague
From December to March, the Prague Museum of Decorative Arts (UPM) is playing host to the world-famous photography of Josef Koudelka. Presented in an exhibition entitled ‘Ruins’, the photographs are the product of over two decades of visits to historical sites by the Czech-French photographer.
Open from Wednesday 4th of December, several halls of Prague’s Museum of Decorative Arts are dedicated for the next four months to the black-and-white images created by Josef Koudelka. First displayed in Paris in 2020, Mr. Koudelka’s Ruins series has been published in book form too, and the collection has now been donated to the Czech state.
Mr. Koudelka was born in the Moravian town of Boskovice in 1938, and became interested in photography from a young age. After finishing a degree at the Czech Technical University in Prague in 1961, he set off on travels through rural parts of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, France and Spain, photographing as he went, with a particular focus on documenting the lives of the Roma in those countries.
He arrived back in Czechoslovakia shortly before the Warsaw-Pact Invasion of 1968. His pictures of that historic event were smuggled out of the country, and were distributed abroad. For the sake of safety, Mr. Koudelka was credited only as “P.P.” (‘Prague Photographer’). He fled to the UK in 1970, becoming a member of the prestigious international agency Magnum Photos, and a French citizen in 1987.
Mr. Koudelka was back in Prague for the opening of Ruins this week. The eighty-six-year-old, who is now based in Czechia, talked to Czech Radio about his views of photography, and why he is still engaged in the art:
“I used to say that photographers usually stopped taking photos because they said they had nothing more to say, or that they were not interested. I am still extremely interested in the world … My time is limited, I have felt it my whole life. I understood that when I am healthy and feel good, I have to do what interests me the most, which is photography.”
The photographs currently on display at the UPM feature no people, only the stones, trees, bushes, dilapidated buildings and shadows of people at two hundred archaeological sites across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. As is usual for Mr. Koudelka, the pictures were taken over many years, specifically between 1991 and 2017. Samples of what would become Ruins were exhibited in Prague back in 2017, while the full exhibition reached its final form in 2020. A common theme of the photographer’s oeuvre has been the impact of humanity on landscapes, such as the legacy of heavy industry in European countries. Mr. Koudelka made the thinking behind Ruins clear with the following motto: “Ruins are not the past, but the future. One day everything around us will be ruins.”
Tomáš Pospěch, the curator of the exhibition, who will be leading guided tours around it, reported that a bilingual Czech-English book has been published to accompany the exhibition. It contains forty images selected by Mr. Koudelka, accompanied by quotes from travellers, historians and writers. The Ruins collection is part of a set of 2,500 photographs that have now been donated to the UPM. The donation also included Mr. Koudelka’s earlier photographic cycles Invasion, Beginnings, Experiments, Theatre, Gypsies, Exiles and Panorama.
