Josef Koudelka: MISSION PHOTOGRAPHIQUE TRANSMANCHE. Photographs by Josef Koudelka. Centre de Développement Culturel de Calais/Centre Régional de la Photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais: Cahier 6. Éditions de la Différence, 1989. First edition. Text in French with English translations appended. Oblong quarto. Original concertina folded pages in self wrappers with loose heavy card inserted next to the first and last pages, titles in black to the front cover. Housed in the original printed card slipcase with monochrome photographic illustration and text in black. 15 panoramic duotone plates. Introductions. A very good to near fine copy with lightly soiled wrappers and fore edge of the textblock starting to curl. The slipcase is in very good condition with mild edgewear and a somewhat crushed spine.
11.75 x 9.25 slipcased edition: an elaborate and extravagent production consisting of 15 panoramic duotone plates. Introductions by Bernard Latarjet and Michel Guillot. A series of 15 gorgeously printed panoramas of Calais that effectively erase the old distinction between "documentary and fiction, objectivity and invention...[Koudelka] makes use of photography to reappropriate the world, just as he uses the world to make photographs"--from Bernard Latarjet's essay.
This is the sixth of a six volume set of photographic monographs by different photographers commissioned by the Centre Regional de la Photographie Nord-Pas-de-Paris documenting the building and effect of the Dover to Calais Channel tunnel. Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Josef Koudelka" at the Gallery of Contemporary Art CDC Calais, 8 December 1998 to 4 February 1990.
Stark, impassioned, and singularly intense, the work of the itinerant and fiercely independent Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka, has received deserved acclaim over the past three decades for having made a uniquely significant contribution to the language of photography. Whether photographing Prague's avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, the secretive world of the Eastern European gypsies, Czech resistance to the Soviet advance on Prague, or the environmental degradation of our postindustrial world, Koudelka has consistently produced transformative images that stand outside of time and place. In the words of the legendary French photography-world figure and Koudelka's longtime champion and publisher, Robert Delpire, 'Koudelka brings an intense eye and full heart to each place, object, and person.
Josef Koudelka was born in Moravia in 1938. Initially an aeronautic engineer, he launched full time into photography in the late sixties. In 1968, he photographed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, publishing the results under the pseudonym P.P. (Prague Photographer). Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970 and was briefly stateless before obtaining political asylum in England. Shortly afterwards, he joined Magnum Photos. In 1975 he published Gypsies. Koudelka has exhibited at the MoMA and at the International Centre of Photography in New York, at the Hayward Gallery in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
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