Czech Book

Born in what is now the eastern Czech Republic in 1938, Josef Koudelka is one of the foremost photographers of his generation. He originally made a living as an aeronautical engineer, but began to gain recognition as a photographer through his pictures of drama productions. His debut exhibition was unveiled at Prague's Semafor Theatre in 1961, and soon afterward he began contributing to a theater magazine, Divadlo . While this connection to the stage seems arbitrary, it helped define two of his key qualities as a photographer: a knack for instinctively recognizing dramatic intensity in his subjects' lives, and an...