Josef Koudelka Quotes

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.

I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

For me what photographers say about their photos doesn’t have any importance. For me it is just enough to look at the pictures. Many times - for the boring pictures - people have to say so many things about them to show you there is something to them when many times there is nothing.

I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.

The maximum, that is what has always interested me.

I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not 'photographing', in order to keep the eye in practice.

If a picture is good, it tells many different stories.

It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It's important that I take them. There were periods where I didn't have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: 'Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.' I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: 'Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,' I would have refused.

I am not interested in repetition. I don't want to reach the point from where I wouldn't know how to go further. It's good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.

The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what's left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist.

The biggest lesson in photography is that from negative we make a positive

My photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers... They say, 'We came to liberate you....' I say: 'Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.' They say: 'No. We never... no shooting. No. No.' So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say, 'Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.' And they have to believe me.

I don't pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.

I don't like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.

I have never had any hero in my life or in photography. I just travel, I look and everything influences me. Everything influences me. I am quite different now than I was 40 years ago. For 40 years I have been traveling. I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it.

My work has no theme. I don't care if my photographs get published, and I have no interest in the news. But the invasion of Prague was not news, it was my life.

When I photograph, I do not think much. If you looked at my contacts you would ask yourself: "What is this guy doing?" But I keep working with my contacts and with my prints, I look at them all the time. I believe that the result of this work stays in me and at the moment of photographing it comes out, without my thinking of it.

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, "Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer."

If I am dissatisfied, it's simply because good photos are few and far between. A good photo is a miracle.

What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.