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.

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.

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 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."

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.

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

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.