Josef Koudelka

1978 Awarded the Prix Nadar, by the Gens d’Images, Paris, for his book Gitans: La fin du voyage.

1980-87 Leaves England to reside in France. Still stateless, he continues to travel throughout Europe.

1984 First major exhibition, conceived by Robert Delpire and organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain, is held at the Hayward Gallery, London. To accompany the exhibition, Josef Koudelka, Collection Photo Poche, is published in English and in French by the Centre National de la Photographie, Paris.
After the death of his father and after sixteen years of anonymity, Koudelka’s photos of the Warsaw Pact armies’ invasion of Prague are published for the first time with his own name. Before this date he wished to spare his family still living in Czechoslovakia, from any possible reprisal.

1986 Invited by the Mission Photographique de la D.A.T.A.R., he photographs through 1987 as part of a national project to document urban and rural landscape in France. It was for this project that he first began to photograph with a panoramic camera.