Text from Max
Kozloff, Lone Visions, Crowded Frames
Koudelka's
Theater of Exile
... It's shocking to think
of how much in current Western experience is ruled out by Koudelka, and
nullified as if it never existed. One could search practically in vain for the
historical Europe or the tourist scene, the life of the middle classes,
plastics, the consumer market, signs, cars, modern diversions, blue-collar
existence, productive systems of any kind, in short the characteristic Jamboree
of the late twentieth century. It takes a certain exclusionary genius to have
rejected such a sights while still asserting one's ties to people. A great deal
has been made of the solitary spirit of Koudelka's work, but that spirit
protests too much. Because of his rhetorical estrangement, his world may be as
inhospitable as It is unfamiliar, but it remains a world of minority cultures,
whose religious and funerary rituals It intimately discloses. The question of
how long these cultures will continue to exist in recognizable form is held in
suspense by his imagery. Pre-industrial and mostly unrelated to any sizable
economy, they seem to be holding on, in atrophied, ingrown states, a dwindling
that has spurred him to make his late records. Europe had no place for the
Eastern Slovakian gypsies Koudelka photographed in the sixties, and the Spanish
peasantry of his more recent images would not seem to have the brightest
prospects either. At first glance, it looks as if he's declared his theme to be
rural, Third World poverty, but the faces, though gnarled like those in
undeveloped countries, are Caucasian. What happens in his pictures seems to
have taken place a long time ago, under archaic conditions, hard to remember .
. . so that their actual contemporaneity appears misplaced.
The first plate of
Koudelka's most recent book, Exiles, which accompanied his show at the
International Center of Photography this summer in New York (it had traveled
there from Paris), shows the photographer's left forearm stretched from a
balcony over an empty Prague boulevard. The year is fateful, 1968, and the
gesture is unmistakably that of someone who consults his watch. It's twelve
o'clock, a noon hour here momentous because of its silence and emptiness, as if
to mark a large strike. The photographer engages us with a symbolic interval of
his resistance as a fighter on behalf of the aborted Dubcek liberalization. His
subsequent flight from the Brezhnev armed clampdown, along with numerous other
Czech intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers, was an escape to a freedom in the
West whose embryo promise they had lost at home. (In this era of glasnost, the
persistence of the Czech regime in its singularly reactionary unbending course
indicates all the more glaringly what they were up against.)
In the case of Koudelka,
however, welcome into Western creative circles did not lead him to an
endorsement of the materialism, much less the capitalist ethic, that surrounded
him there. The only pictures really impacted with things in his entire career
are of Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, swarmed over by defiant but impotent
crowds during the time of national humiliation and trauma. Events like that
have the capacity to mark an artist's vision. Though befriended in the West
(particularly at the photo agency of Paris Magnum, which took him as a member),
and clearly grateful for it, Koudelka was never consoled. It can be argued that
this diffident man, who lives and travels as lightly as possible, is by
temperament an uprooted character. In the early sixties, as a young man, an
aeronautical engineer and theater photographer, he had already been taking
pictures of the outcast gypsies, a foretaste of his experience as one
expatriated in his own turn. Still, there had once been a homeland for his
alienation, and now he was forced to reproduce and project it by the sheer
strength of his nomadic will. So, the pictorial introduction of his book is
also really a closing down, a climax from which there could only follow an
anticlimax. But from that ensues his meaning, as it's realized that our Western
Europe has been suffused by Koudelka's downcast view of Eastern Europe.
...
One of his admirers, Romeo
Martinez, observes that "Koudelka has recognized in the theater a form and
a metaphor of life." This idea is seconded by Robert Delpire, who not only
originally organized Koudelka's recent show, in France, but was the first to
publish Frank's Americans in the fifties. Delpire says that Koudelka's
work is "marked by a sort of theatrical organization of reality." In
such a view, the subjects of the photographs function as players on a stage,
and it is true that some of them perform obvious roles, such as a little boy
with angel wings and sneakers on a bicycle, or a young gypsy man cuffed and
condemned on the edge of a village. Interestingly, both these individuals are
removed from their nominal audiences but are close to the camera. Imaginative
or real as were their onetime scripts, they now perform unknowingly in dramas
devised on the spot by the spectator's eye of the itinerant photographer. He is
an expert in showing us two or more scenarios adjacent to each other in the
frame, not merely keeping track of them but welding them together freshly in a
new production. A one-armed bather seems resentful of a squalling baby on a
Portuguese beach-as far as Koudelka will go in depicting vacation. Some kids
horse around in a Spanish alley while just around the corner, in the foreground
and out of their sight, a baggily dressed fellow seems to play uninvited
hide-and-seek. Four Irishmen piss against the wall of a concrete trench, and
though they avoid noticing each other, as men typically do in such quarters,
Koudelka, behind them, makes a dramatic synthesis of their isolation.
While the town or village
offers Koudelka's theatrical flair such glints of reduced sociality (which are
humorous and a little sinister), what of the country? He almost seems to thrill
to the depressing vacancy of open reaches and plains. He's a vagrant explorer
of unpopulated places where every now and then he finds like-minded passersby, animal
or human. He insists on the freedom to be without direction, to be derelict, to
be attracted to the unlovely and unploughed field or heath, where there is no
refuge from the feeling of loss. Here is nature, spoiled not by industry-but by
the viewer's own malaise. Koudelka's pictures of this type never make it to the
status of landscape. The weather is bad. Someone throws up a ball, in poetic
ennui, and a horse lounges in the distance. Later in his work, we realize that
this desolate mode overmasters; the ecstatic one of the denser groupings. The
impression grows that an admirable independence of spirit can have its morbid
side: instead of going his own way, the photographer shuns people out of
reclusive need, weariness perhaps, or suspicion. If the smallest incident or
modest object-a glance, graceful debris-becomes an event, it may be because of
a disheartened vitality that has to disguise itself.
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