Stark, impassioned, and singularly intense, the work of the itinerant and fiercely independent Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka, has received deserved acclaim over the past three decades for having made a uniquely significant contribution to the language of photography. This major new monograph presents the most comprehensive survey of Koudelka's work to date, bringing together more than 150 of his most eloquent images--from his earliest, many published here for the first time, to his most recent: mesmerizing studies of the European landscape made with a panoramic camera. Whether photographing Prague's avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, the secretive world of the Eastern European gypsies, Czech resistance to the Soviet advance on Prague, or the environmental degradation of our postindustrial world, Koudelka has consistently produced transformative images that stand outside of time and place. In the words of the legendary French photography-world figure and Koudelka's longtime champion and publisher, Robert Delpire, Koudelka brings an intense eye and full heart to each place, object, and person. This work proves once again that he is a photographer with unique personality and power. Beautifully produced with duotone printing and three gatefolds, this volume also contains eight original essays, each exploring a different aspect of Koudelka's work and illustrating the artist's constant evolution and intensity.

"The photographer Josef Koudelka is as nomadic & unpredictable as the Gypsies whose existence he has brilliantly chronicled."-Vanity Fair

Josef Koudelka has reached acclaimed fame in the United States after his previous books Invasion and Retrospective by Aperture.

When he arrived in Paris, Koudelka had already produced two outstanding works of reportage. One documented the Prague Spring, while the other, on gypsies, could almost have been an ethnological study had its images not been charged with so much emotion. Unknown in 1970, he rose to become one of the most powerful photographers of his day.This book shows that in the lands of exile through which he travels with his amazing urge to see, Koudelkas own particular talent has been affirmed and expanded.

A collection of dramatic panoramic landscapes by a leading Magnum photographer.

"DECREAZIONE" is a book collecting Joseph Koudelka's images exhibited at the fifty-firth Venice Biennale, at the Vatican Pavilion. With his suggestive black-and-white images and his moving, desolated landscapes, Koudelka tells stories of destruction, declined in three different forms: time, violence, and contrast between nature and uncontrolled industrial development. Josef Koudelka was born in Moravia in 1938. He published numerous photographic books on the relationship between man and landscape, about gypsy life, and on the invasion of Prague in 1968. Significant exhibitions of his works have been held at international museums and galleries and he received numerous major awards.

This powerful document of the spiritual and physical state of exile now contains 10 new images by master of photography Josef Koudelka. The sense of mystery that fills these photographs mostly taken during Koudelkas years of wandering through Europe and the United States since leaving his native Czechoslovakia speaks of passion and reserve, of his rage to see. The brilliant accompanying essay by Robert Delpire invokes the soul of man in search of a spiritual homeland; it speaks with a remarkable and unforgettable dignity.