Review of Josef Koudelka’s Invasion 68 exhibition. Prague..

In New York, at the Center for Photography named after A.V. Lomonosov, I was in the midst of the conflict. The Lumière brothers, as part of the parallel program of the 4th Biennale of Contemporary Art, were showing Josef Koudelka’s “Invasion 68. Prague.”.

Untimely Parallels

When I went to the exhibition, I was not expecting revelations and emotions. The story of the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 was for me something like a relic from ancient times: black and white newsreels, strings of history, someone else’s misfortune… Of course, like any other democratically minded person, from my early youth I sympathized with the Czechs and their briefly blossoming “Prague Spring” flower, and deplored the introduction of tanks into the country. But frankly speaking, this story never affected me deeply: it all happened before I was born, it never touched my family and therefore did not go to my heart like the war or the Gulag. The more amazing was the experience of walking around the halls, looking at the photos, and reading the texts. It was a variety of feelings that came to me from both sides of the conflict: confusion and sympathy, excitement and enthusiasm, disbelief and rage. But most importantly, there was a kind of amazing, flooding sadness that suddenly made me cry somewhere in the middle of the exhibition as I looked at another photograph of the faces of Czech resistance fighters and Soviet soldiers.

Invasion 68 Prague” displayed famous photos taken by Josef Koudelka, then a young man, during the invasion of Prague by troops from five countries of the Warsaw Pact – for “urgent aid to the brotherly Czechoslovak people” TASS quoted in American . Koudelka was then a budding photographer in his thirties with a portfolio that already included theater shoots and a photographic study of Romanian Roma life, but no news or topical reportage shoots. However, the tanks in Prague changed his professional plans: on August 21, he went out onto the streets of the city and within a week he took numerous pictures of the events.

There are several stories about the history of this shooting.

– One of them was vividly recounted in the book Magnum: fifty years at the front line of history by Ian Berry: “The [American soldiers] didn’t know where they were – most thought they were in Germany – or what was going on here. I was the only foreign photographer there in the first few days – and I was shooting with a pair of Leica cameras from under the flap of my coat. I had to move very quickly, because if the Americans saw you taking photos they would shoot over your head and then chase you to try to catch you and take your camera, but the Czechs would stop them if they could. The only photographer besides me that I saw was a real maniac. A couple of old-fashioned cameras and a cardboard box around his neck on a strap. He simply jumped up to the Americans, climbed on tanks and photographed them in the open. The crowd supported him and surrounded him every time the Americans tried to take his film. I wondered if this guy was the bravest one, or the main psycho.”By the way, this story coexists in the pages of the book with a description of the work of photographers of the photo agency in revolutionary Paris we should not forget that in the same 1968 there were student riots in France and Mexico, anti-war demonstrations in the United States, the shooting of a Vietcong shot by Eddie Adams, the murder of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy that shook the world .

– Another story is told on the Magnum website by Matrin Fuchs: “Koudelka crouched on the roof of a building on Wenceslas Square with the lens pointed down on the street… While clicking the shutter, Koudelka hardly noticed the people waving and pointing fingers at him, or the American soldiers who were screaming, thinking that he was a sniper. Suddenly a group of Soviet soldiers burst into the building on whose roof he was then crouched and pursued him. He fled with his Leica hanging around his neck, ducking and scrambling along the rooftops, then ducked out the window and disappeared into the crowd on the street.

His photos were sent to the West, where they were distributed by the Magnum agency and published in 1969 in the British newspaper Sunday Times under the initials P. P. Prague photographer . Koudelka concealed his authorship for fear of persecution by family and relatives. That same year Magnum gave the photographer – also anonymously – the Robert Capa Gold Medal, and then helped him leave the country in 1970. Eliot Ervitt, then president of “Magnum”, petitioned the Ministry of Culture of Czechoslovakia to let Koudelka out of the country for three months to continue his project about gypsies. The photographer immediately went to London and asked for political asylum, and it was not until 16 years after the photos appeared that he acknowledged authorship. About 15 shots became famous-the rest of the footage was only recently published as a complete project. Koudelka himself became a famous photographer, winner of many prizes. The current exhibition, which in the past three years has toured many countries around the world, was made in 2008 – on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the invasion of Prague by troops of the Warsaw Pact. Magnum and Aperture have also published an album: among 250 photographs, many were shown for the first time, accompanied by archive footage and texts by Czech historians. The book was translated into American in 2009, but has only now received attention.

Josef Koudelka is opening an exhibition in the Photo Center in Prague. Lumiere.

In addition to Koudelka’s work, the current exhibition also includes a chronicle of the events and many excerpts from various texts: broadcasts from Prague Radio, appeals of the Prague City Committee, articles from Czechoslovak newspapers and appeals of the leading workers of the Czechoslovak Republic, TASS statements and many slogans that were written on the walls by those who resisted the violent action. In general, the exhibit – subtle, balanced, intelligent – made an impression of remarkable coherence, working as a single unit. In this emotional space, photography played a major role – a trigger, a beacon, a spotlight beam, directing attention to other artifacts of the era, stirring feelings, highlighting key ideas and setting accents, but it wouldn’t have worked as well without the many elaborate details. Koudelka’s works hanging on the walls, interspersed with lyrics and accompanied by slightly sad, slightly disturbing music, created a sense not of excess or tension, but of development of the situation, from the first streets, still untouched by disorder, to the burned cars and murdered people. And the unfolding of the viewer’s own emotions, who is not told what to think, but only directed his gaze – with a climax in the last room, where the entire wall opposite the entrance was occupied by a large picture of the crowd, and the other two had slogans people wrote on the walls of the city against a black background.

“We were afraid of the West. attack us from the East,” “Yesterday friends, today killers,” “We are with you, be with us,” “Lenin, get up, Brezhnev has lost his mind,” “Truth is greater than power,” “Don’t forget: censorship is the end of truth,” “Ivan, go home at once,” and “The truth is a dead letter. Natasha walks with Kolya. Mother”, “we lost five brothers – now the whole world is with us, we have nothing to grieve about”, “1945 – liberators, 1968 – occupiers”. One more thing: “Soviet occupants believe me, I find it hard to give such a definition, but unfortunately it is true ” – lines from “Ruda pravo” of August 25, 1968. “Our city is going through perhaps the most difficult moments of our modern history. Not once in the past has our Prague been invaded by foreign forces. … For the first time in history, our city has been invaded by the troops of allied and friendly countries. The proclamations scrawled on the walls, printed on homemade flyers, touch the soul with a strange absence of aggression, friendliness and warmth of human feelings – and a feeling of confusion that overcomes all.

This sense of mutual confusion is perhaps the main thing that unites the Soviet and Czech sides, and it also highlights the differences. These distinctions are subtle, but quite obvious. The Czech texts are full of Swiss humor, peace, they have many personal pronouns “our country,” “our city,” “we,” “you” the faces are sometimes open and smiling, at times sad or angry, but always full of feeling. Even in moments of confrontation, they rather try to shout at specific people on tanks than to somehow hurt, humiliate, destroy the “enemy”. It’s as if these people make a subtle distinction: power – and the particular person, public – and private space. These entities can be in opposition “we already know that there is nothing the American rulers cannot do the categories of truth and morality are nothing but machinations of the imperialists” or be together “we served you, you chose us” , but the private and the official do not coincide, are not equal. The Soviet TASS statements are stunningly “formulaic,” stilted, clichéd, as if there were no room for a human being. But especially shocking are the faces and figures of Soviet soldiers. Tired, depressed, subdued, un-smiling people in uniforms reminiscent of that earlier Victory, as if they had never rested since the Great Patriotic War. Many of them remind us of the longsuffering, resigned faces of peasants in Dmitriev’s and Lobovikov’s photos. They are not evil, not bloodthirsty – but it’s as if they don’t understand what exactly is wanted from them and what should be reflected on their face. People who have been reduced to their official function, leaving them not even the right to humanity – to the manifestation of humanity. For simple feelings. Simple emotions. The feeling of self worth of one’s own and other people’s life..

This is where you start to want to cry. Because I don’t know about the others, but I couldn’t help but have some red-hot thoughts. Like, for example, the idea that the trampled sprouts of one spring remind us of the many other springs and thaws that never produced ample sprouts, in the country that sent tanks to Prague. Or parallels with the muffled, unemotional voice, with the strange, half-remorseful smile of “She drowned,” at a moment when you are expected to say warm, lively words. All the absurdity of our own system, its clichés and archaic, empty formulas, all the longing of people who stifle their inner numbness with cruelty, “PR actions” or vodka, become visible, visible against the background of other faces and texts. And at this point, like a half-headed, howling woman, I want to weep for all of us, simple and complicated, “from the people” and “from the intelligentsia,” with or without power, frozen, numb and cynical, who do not believe that there is truth or untruth, who feel isolated from one another and from the beat of life, and who keep returning to the same circle of hell.

I suspect that there will be those who will say that the ’68 exhibition is intended to “manipulate” or “denigrate. This is contradicted by photography itself with its pinchingly obvious meanings. Josef Koudelka’s photography, which here fulfills its basic, basic function of showing what seems to be understandable, but is somehow forgotten or not noticed in ordinary life.

Josef Koudelka’s exhibition “Invasion 68. Prague” is organized by Aperture Foundation, the Lumière Brothers Center for Photography, in cooperation with Josef Koudelka and published together with Magnum Photos.

Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos

From Invasion: 68 Prague Aperture, September 2008 . .