The Picker Art Gallery and the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University present

INVASION 68: PRAGUE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
JOSEF KOUDELKA

October 15 through November 20, 2009

Clifford Art Gallery, Little Hall, Colgate University

In 1968 Josef Koudelka was thirty years old. He had committed himself to photography as a full-time career only recently, and had been chronicling the theater and the lives of gypsies, but he had never photographed 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 freedom in Czechoslovakia that came to be known as the Prague Spring. In the midst of the turmoil of the Soviet-led invasion, Koudelka took to the streets to document this critical moment. It was a major turning point in his life.

Koudelka's photographs of the invasion were miraculously smuggled out of the country. A year after they reached New York, Magnum Photos distributed the images, but credited them 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 passed before Koudelka could safely acknowledge authorship.

The exhibition, Invasion 68 Prague, is comprised of images personally selected by Josef Koudelka from his extensive archive, and is co-produced with Magnum Photos. Conceived as an installation it features large-scale, ink-jet prints as well as related texts.

In August 2008, Aperture published the monograph of the same title on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the invasion.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, by generous support from Mark and Elizabeth Levine. Additional support provided by HP and Coloredge.


Josef Koudelka, Warsaw Pact Troops Invade Prague, Czechoslovakia, August 1968, Courtesy of Aperture Foundation   Josef Koudelka, Defending the Czechoslovak Radio Building, Prague, 1968, Courtesy of Aperture Foundation   Josef Koudelka, Invasion by Warsaw Pact Troops, Prague, Czechoslovakia, August 1968, Courtesy of Aperture Foundation
 


Opening Reception
Thursday, October 15, 5-7 pm
Clifford Art Gallery, Little Hall

Lecture
Thursday, October 15, 4:30 pm
Golden Auditorium, Little Hall

Fred Ritchin
1968: the Unbearable Relevance of Photography

There was a time when the publication of photographs led to protests in the streets and governments reconsidering policies, when photography could be seen as a pivotal agent of social change, a credible window onto the world and not a distorting mirror. In the cataclysmic year of 1968, Josef Koudelka, a young aeronautical engineer, intimately photo- graphed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and published the photographs anonymously for fear of reprisals. Others photographed events that riveted much of the world such as the rioting students in the streets of Paris, the starving people of Biafra, the Black Power salutes on the victory stand in Mexico City’s Olympics, the battle of Hue, the assassinations of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the earth as seen for the first time from outer space. This lecture will examine the work of Josef Koudelka in conjunction with the history of his photographic agency, Magnum Photos, and the events of 1968. The question remains: Can photographs still be as relevant today?