Josef Koudelka: Reconnaissance-Wales

Every now and then I'm revisiting some of the photography books and other items on my shelves here. This time it’s . . .

One of my biggest regrets in life was having the chance to go down the pub with Josef Koudelka and missing it. I was out of town. Drat. At the time I was living in Wales, studying for a degree in Documentary Photography at Newport. He came pretty much un-announced that day, chatted with some students then went for a beer with them. And I, of course, was somewhere else. Newport was actually a place that Koudelka returned to often, using the home of fellow Magnum photographer, David Hurn, as a base while travelling and photographing around Europe during his years of exile from the Czech Republic. It was the same David Hurn that founded the Documentary Photography course at Newport so there’s the connection. 

Koudelka’s relationship with Wales was consolidated further in the late 1990s through a commission from Ffotogallery in Cardiff to produce a series of images around the post-industrial landscape of the area. He made six trips to South Wales, working over a two-year period. The resulting book, Reconnaissance-Wales, was published in 1998 along with an exhibition at Ffotogallery, and that's where I bought my copy of the book. It probably cost me about £20 at the time which would have stretched my student budget but it turned out to be a good investment. Printed as a limited edition, it’s a rare book to find these days and copies can cost up to €1,000. 

Like his Chaos series published the following year, Reconnaissance was shot on panoramic format and printed wide over double pages. There are only 16 photographs in the book although that doesn’t really matter.. each image is strong enough to draw you in and keep you there. There is something about the panoramic format, especially when printed large, that requires you to look around the image. It’s difficult to take in the entire photograph without moving your head from side to side, lingering on certain forms and textures, building the scene up piece by piece. 

The images are typical Koudelka: beautifully observed, carefully composed, often dark, sometimes slanted, they have a weight and solidity to match the industrial landscape they are describing. What we see is a damaged landscape. Over the course of the project he surveyed nearly all the open-cast mines and industrial plants around the hills and valleys that run down to Cardiff Bay. 

I get the feeling that for Koudelka the emphasis was on ‘land’ rather than ‘landscape’. For the most part the images present us with layers and surfaces - mud, water, stone and concrete -that merge between the natural and the man-made… or rather, the man-scarred. In some ways they remind me of Fay Godwin’s images from her book, Land. It’s a different style and format and, well, pretty much different in every way I guess, but in my mind there’s a line of thought - our relationship with nature - that links the two. While Fay Godwin’s subject is man’s intervention upon a predominantly natural landscape, for Koudelka there is little of anything entirely natural to be found. 

When thinking about images like these I do struggle with the word 'landscape'. I feel like we’re missing a word in English that could describe pictures of the land but without the ‘scape’ or any suggestion of the picturesque, the sublime or other art-historical associations. The French ‘tiers paysage’ ('third landscape') is useful but it typically only relates to areas on the margins of towns and cities. 'Topographic' seems too detached for my liking, as does 'documentary landscape'. Just out of interest I posed the question to ChatGPT, explaining my difficulties, and it came back with 'post-landscape' so perhaps I'll go with that.

Looking at this book again after 27 years I realise how much Koudelka influenced me as a young photographer back in the day. Exiles in particular was a seminal book for me. My own small series, ‘New South Wales’, from 2001 makes an obvious reference to his work. And even my more recent projects have something of him within them, or within me. 

That's why I still regret the day I went to London to see an exhibition and missed the chance for a pint with Koudelka. I’m very happy to have a copy of this rare book but if it was a signed and beer-stained copy I’d be even happier.

Reconnaissance-Wales by Josef Koudelka. Published by Ffotogallery, Cardiff, 1998.