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The photographs of Josef Koudelka’s latest series were made over many years, from 1991 to 2017, at more than 200 archaeological sites in the Mediterranean, including Albania, Algeria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. To accompany the exhibition, a Czech-English volume is being published with articles by the Czech art historian Tomáš Pospěch and the French archaeologist Alain Schnapp. The volume contains 40 pictures, which is a narrow selection identical with the large panoramic photographs shown at the exhibition. The photographs from the Ruins project are part of the generous gift of roughly 2,500 photographs of his life’s work, which Mr Koudelka has presented to the Museum over the past few years.
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.
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