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Background information
The volume 'Josef Koudelka. Next: A Visual Biography' by Melissa Harris - more a text book than a photographic volume is the definitive and only authorized biography of Josef KOUDELKA (b.1938) — an intimate portrait of the life and work of one of photography’s most renowned and celebrated artists.
Throughout his more than sixty-year-long obsession with the medium, Josef KOUDELKA considers a remarkable range of photographic subjects - from his early theater work, to his seminal project on the Roma and his legendary coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, to the solitariness of exile and the often-devastating impact humans have had on the landscape.
Content
The book 'Josef Koudelka. Next: A Visual Biography' by Melissa Harris embraces all of his projects and his evolution as an artist in the context of his life story and working process. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of almost a decade with the Czech Magnum photographer - as well as ongoing conversations with his friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators worldwide - this deftly told, richly illustrated biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind of this notoriously private photographer.
Writer, editor, and curator Melissa Harris has independently crafted a unique, in-depth, and revelatory personal history of both the man and his photography. The visual presentation is conceived in collaboration with Koudelka himself, as well as his longtime collaborator, Czech designer Aleš NAJBRT." (slightly adapted publishers text, © Aperture, 2023)