Fotograf Magazine

The day before the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Josef Koudelka, who was thirty-years-old at the time, returned from Romania, where he had been photographing Roma (gypsies). This was a topic that, in addition to theatrical photography, he had been studying for many years. In fact he quit his career as an aero-spatial engineer to become a fulltime photographer. Despite the fact that he had never done photo-reports before, his pictures taken during several, dramatic August days became symbols of the fight for freedom. Today they belong among the classic works of photojournalism.