Pages intérieures
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Koudelka Theatre
ISBN: 9791095821403
(PB - EN)
€
"Moving among the actors on set, I was able to take the same scene, multiple times, but differently. It taught me how to get the most out of a given situation, and I have continued to apply this method to my work." - Josef Koudelka
In his own words, Josef Koudelka was not particularly interested in theatre in his youth. When he arrived in Prague from his Moravian village in the late 1950s, his focus was on his studies. His interests were airplanes, folk music, and photography, which he practiced as an amateur. A classmate recommended that he meet his uncle, who worked in the editorial staff of the magazine Divadlo (Theatre), then looking for a photographer. It was in this context that Josef Koudelka, soon to become an aeronautical engineer by profession, became a theatre photographer.
In the 1960s, Prague theatres were one of the rare places in Soviet Czechoslovakia where relative freedom of expression continued. The playwright and essayist Vaclav Havel, future President of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (1989-1992) was particularly active there, notably at the Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo na zabradli). Known for its presentation of the Theatre of the Absurd, where directors such as Jan Grossman interpreted Ubu Roi, by Alfred Jarry (1964), Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, and Intermezzo by Jean Giraudoux. Following the Prague Spring (1968), these stages were forced to close, and their animators dissented or left the country.
There is a rich correlation of levels between Koudelka's theatrical photography and his later way of conceiving his images as a reflection on the theatre of the world. Everything that we know of his practice of the image can be found from his beginnings in the work he did in Prague in the 1960s: his attention to graphic composition, his ease of working in tight spaces among people in movement and in difficult lighting situations, his obsession with returning again and again to the same motif, the same gestures and rituals.
The design of the book is inspired by the work of the leading graphic designer and scenographer in the theatrical community in Prague at the time, Libor Fara (1925-1988), husband of Anna Farova, curator and historian of photography who helped Koudelka at the start of his career. The typography was created by Studio Najbrt in 2020, from an old typewriter of the time evoking Samizdats, clandestine works banned by Soviet censorship.
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