“When I left Czechoslovakia, I was discovering the world around me. What I needed most was to travel so that I could take photographs.” Josef Koudelka

Prague, Wenceslas Square, August 22, 1968: An arm is thrust into the picture. The watch on its wrist indicates the time. In the days before, tanks of the Warsaw Pact had entered the city to the screech of tank tracks on the cobblestones. This photograph by Josef Koudelka fits chronologically into his series Invasion, in which he shows the passionate resistance of his compatriots to the Red Army’s determination to quell by bloody means the democratic fervor of the Prague Spring. But it is also the first photograph in his book Exiles, published twenty years later, in 1988, by Robert Delpire.

1968 was a pivotal year—both in the West and in the East. Koudelka’s photographs leave a lasting impression of these historical events, conveying a vibrant immediacy and intimacy with the situation and the depicted people that goes beyond all documentation.

After leaving Czechoslovakia in 1970 on a three-month exit visa, Koudelka remained in the West, received asylum as a political refugee in England, and became a member of the Magnum photographic collective in 1971, before he moved to Paris in 1980. Exile had a deep impact on his photography and resulted in one of his most important and personal bodies of work. In his twenty years of wandering without a set residence, without possessions, and equipped only with a camera, he created numerous images that offer glimpses of the landscapes, people, and daily life in countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, as well as of the traditions and rites from the past. They were first published in 1988 in the book entitled Exiles.

For his most recent work, Josef Koudelka traveled through Israel and the Palestinian territories from 2008 to 2012 and documented the wall erected by the state of Israel in the West Bank as well as Israeli settlements, resulting with a series entitled Wall. In the early 2000s Israel unilaterally decided on building the wall on the pretext of protecting itself from terrorist attacks. A nine-meter-tall and today over 700-kilometer-long fortress made of steel, concrete, barbed wire, and motion detectors—almost three times as high and five times as long as the Berlin Wall once was. Koudelka’s panoramic photographs of the monumental barrier are also a personal project for the photographer who grew up behind the Iron Curtain and who is perpetually drawn back to the theme of freedom.

Koudelka’s black-and-white photographs are both intimate and empathetic. His interest is dedicated to ethnic and social groups that are threatened by extinction or expulsion and often also reflect Koudelka’s own nomadic way of life. Josef Koudelka is one of those few outstanding photographers whose images decisively influenced the developments of the history of photography in the second half of the twentieth century through their intense, moving, and authentic look.

Josef Koudelka. Invasion. Exiles. Wall presents three significant stages of the work by the Magnum photographer in the first exhibition dedicated to him in Germany in almost thirty years. It includes approximately 120 photographs and projections, ranging from the Soviet occupation of his homeland in 1968 to his time in exile and the large-scale photographic project on the wall built by Israel in the West Bank.

Exhibition organized in partnership with the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam