In 1968, Josef Koudelka was a 30-year-old acclaimed theater photographer who had never made pictures of a news event. That all changed on the night of August 21, when Warsaw Pact tanks invaded the city of Prague, ending the short-lived political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring. Koudelka had returned home the day before from photographing gypsies in Romania. In the midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, he took a series of photographs which were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after they reached New York, Magnum Photos distributed the images credited to an unknown Czech photographer to avoid reprisals. The intensity and significance of the images earned the still-anonymous photographer the Robert Capa Award. Sixteen years would pass before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship. Forty years after the invasion, this impressive monograph features nearly 250 of these searing images — most of them published here for the first time — personally selected by Koudelka from his extensive archive. Interspersed with the images are press and propaganda quotations from the time, also selected by Koudelka, alongside a text by three Czech historians. Though the images gathered in this remarkable publication document a specific historical event, their transformative quality still resonates.

Josef Koudelkas Wall comprises panoramic landscape photographs he made from 2008 to 2012 in East Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and in various Israeli settlements along the route of the barrier separating Israel and Palestine. Whereas Israel calls it the security fence, Palestinians call it the apartheid wall, and groups like Human Rights Watch use the term separation barrier, the wall in Koudelkas project is metaphorical in naturefocused on it as a human fissure in the natural landscape. Sometimes blocks of concrete define the panoramas; at other times displaced olive treesa lifeline for one man, collateral damage in anothers claim for territorysubtly emerge. As in his Black Triangle project, made in the Bohemian foothills of the Ore Mountains in the early 1990s, Wall conveys the fraught relationships between humankind and nature and between closely related cultures. A chronology, lexicon, and captions provide context for the photographs. The book is designed by Xavier Barral, working closely with Koudelka, and is a coproduction by Aperture and Editions Xavier Barral. Wall, with texts by Ray Dolphin written in collaboration with Koudelka and project advisor Gilad Baram, is part of a larger project, This Place, initiated by photographer Frederic Brenner. This Place explores Israel as place and metaphor through the eyes of twelve internationally acclaimed photographers, who were invited to look beyond dominant political narratives and to explore the complexity of the place and its resonance for people around the world not to judge, but to question and to reveal.

This book is a revised and enlarged version of the original maquette for Josef Koudelkas book Cikani (Czech for Gypsies), prepared by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva in 1968, and intended for publication in Prague in 1970. However, Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970, and the book was never published in that original form. Koudelkas stark images depict the poverty and clannishness of Gypsy life, but he does not present their situation as a social problem that should somehow be fixed. Instead, he shows the Gypsies as perpetual outsiders, and their lives as a primal mix of glee and wonder, sorrow and mystery. This extended version of the seminal 'Gitans, la fin du voyage' consists of 109 photographs taken between 1962 and 1971 in what was Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. Sociologist Will Guy, author of the text that accompanied the first publication of Gypsies, has contributed an updated essay, tracing the migration of the Roma from their original homeland in northern India, to their current status one that continues to be contested internationally.

Whether photographing avant-garde theatre, gypsies on the steppes of Eastern Europe, resistance to Soviet guns and tanks advancing on Prague, or the environmental degradation of a crumbled empire, Josef Koudelka has consistently produced images that provoke a connection to the larger questions of human existence. This book is the first to unite all his most eloquent images, and is the ultimate volume on this key figure in 20th-century photography.