What does it mean to observe the observer?

“It’s a gift, after all these years of editing books and magazines, to take a deep dive with someone I admired and respected, and who I was interested in and curious about,” writer, curator, and National Magazine Award–winning editor Melissa Harris told me by phone recently.

Harris’s latest book is Josef Koudelka: Next, a sweeping visual biography of Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, one of the most celebrated — and private — artists working in the medium. “In a profession with its share of single-minded swaggerers, Koudelka was on another level,” noted Nicholas Dawidoff, reviewing the artist’s most recent show at the Pace Gallery in New York City. “To be his lover, his child, or his friend was to know that his only full commitment was to his camera, and to what he and the camera would do tomorrow.”
 
The swagger is earned: Koudelka, now 86, has been at work documenting a world in conflict for over 60 years.
 
Among his best-known projects are his coverage of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, the lives of the Romani people, and the experience of exile — including his own after he was forced to leave Czechoslovakia in 1970.

“To be in exile is simply to have left one’s country and to be unable to return. Every exile is a different, personal experience. Myself, I wanted to see the world and photograph it,” Koudelka told Le Monde in 2015. “That’s forty-five years I’ve been travelling. I’ve never stayed anywhere more than three months. When I found no more to photograph, it was time to go.”

Harris’s commitment to Koudelka’s story rivals that of the artist to his craft. Her deep dive into his work lasted the better part of a decade, and her interviews and conversations brought her into rich proximity with the artist, along with his friends, family members, and collaborators around the world. “For me, that was the pleasure,” she told me. “It was the hours I got to spend with him and also everybody in his orbit who mattered to him and who was still living — which was most people.”

The book is co-published by Aperture and the Magnum Foundation. You can flip through it here.

Design Observer’s Jessica Helfand caught up with Harris to learn more about the process of writing the book on a living artist whose figure still looms large. “It was essential that I humanize Koudelka and extricate him from the more reductive and pedestaled realm of myth where so many position him,” she said. “Koudelka has such an isness, is so alive at every moment; I wanted to get at that.” 

A version of this essay was originally published in the Equity Observer email newsletter. Catch up on past issues here. Sign up for insightful commentary, breaking news, and community shout-outs delivered twice weekly. Find your people.

Photo above: JK and Melissa Harris on the train to Boskovice, 2014. Photograph by Lucina Hartley Koudelka; from Josef Koudelka: Next (Aperture, 2023). © Lucina Hartley Koudelka.