The book presents a selection of texts from 68 diaries kept by photographer Josef Koudelka (* 1938) over the last 51 years. It is supplemented by reprints of double-page manuscripts of the diaries and previously unpublished photographs. Koudelka's diaries are a great source of information about his life and work and about world photography from the late 1960s to the present. Here he recorded, in abbreviated form, comments on the work of figures such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, René Burri, William Klein, Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Martin Parr, publisher and editor Robert Delpire, curators John Szarkowski and Anna Fárová, theorist John Berger, and many others. The diaries can also be read as the story of an exile seeking his role in a foreign environment, unwilling to sacrifice the only thing he has gained by losing his home - freedom. Last but not least, it is also a book about friendship, relationships with women, love for children and how one frames one's life through photography.
Czech edition