This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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About the AuthorMelissa Harris is editor-at-large of Aperture Foundation, where she worked for more than twenty years, including as editor-in-chief of Aperture magazine from 2002 to 2012; under her leadership, the magazine received many honors, including ASME’s National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Harris has also edited more than forty books for Aperture, including Letizia Battaglia, Passion, Justice, Freedom; Donna Ferrato, Living with the Enemy; Luigi Ghirri, It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It…; Graciela Iturbide, Images of the Spirit; Sally Mann, Immediate Family; Mary Ellen Mark, Tiny: Streetwise Revisited; Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America; Eugene Richards, Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue; David Vaughan, Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years; and David Wojnarowicz, Brush Fires in the Social Landscape. Harris has curated photography exhibitions for Aperture, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; C/O Berlin (with Sophia Greiff and Kathrin Schönegg); the Triennale Milano (with Germano Celant); Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Villa Pignatelli, Naples; and Visa pour l’Image, Perpignan, among other venues. She continues to curate exhibitions worldwide. Harris teaches at New York University in the Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Photography & Imaging / Emerging Media. She served on New York City’s Community Board 5 for several years and is a trustee of the John Cage Trust. Josef Koudelka: Next, her visual biography of Josef Koudelka, was published by Aperture and Magnum Foundation in November 2023.
About the PhotographerJosef Koudelka was born in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, in 1938. He began his career as an aeronautical engineer; he started photographing the Roma in his spare time in 1962, before turning to photography full time in the late 1960s. In 1968 Koudelka photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague, publishing his photographs under the initials P.P. (Prague photographer). In 1969, he was anonymously awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for the photographs. Koudelka left Czechoslovakia seeking political asylum in 1970, and shortly thereafter he joined Magnum Photos. In 1975 his first book, Gypsies, was published by Aperture (and by Delpire, in France, in 1977 as Gitans: La fin du voyage), and subsequent titles include Exiles (1988), Chaos (1999), Invasion 68: Prague (2008), Wall (2013), and, most recently, Ruins (2020). Koudelka has won major awards, such as the Prix Nadar (1978), Grand Prix National de la Photographie (1989), Grand Prix Cartier-Bresson (1991), and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (1992). Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Decorative Arts and the National Gallery, Prague. In 2012, he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. He is currently based in Paris and Prague. |
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![Picture](/uploads/1/4/2/6/14264399/published/koudelka-cover-flat.jpg?1703198218)
Truth in Photography: Writing a biography is a huge undertaking. What motivated you to write this book about Josef Koudelka?
Melissa Harris: When I was asked by Susan Meiselas if I would be interested in writing Josef Koudelka’s biography for the Magnum Foundation series that Andy Lewin had initiated with them, I actually didn’t think in a million years that Josef would agree to it. That was my first response to Susan: that I would be extremely surprised if he said yes to the proposal. Of course, I also told Susan that I’d be thrilled to do it, if he was game. It would be an unprecedented opportunity to go deep into his life and consider his work in that personal context as well. With a project like this, you want to end up feeling more about the person and the work than when you started. You don’t want it to go in the other direction. His work is so compelling to me, and what I knew about his life was also fascinating—I was absolutely certain that I would remain intensely engaged.
After Susan and I spoke, I didn’t think that much about it because I really didn’t think Josef would agree. He’s private and has never been someone who likes to speak personally, plus he’s always fervently occupied by his work. To my surprise, I soon found out that he was willing to do the biography, which was great—I got super excited. I’d also never had the opportunity to collaborate with Josef visually on a book, and as this was conceived as a visual biography, I’d finally get to experience that as well. I had worked on his 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague exhibition, which complemented a comprehensive book he was publishing of that work [published in 2008], but he curated that and determined the sequence. I took what he did and essentially came up with an installation concept and presentation. But mostly I’d just helped him with interviews, or worked on texts with him for his books, and I loved the idea of working with Josef on selecting, sequencing, and laying out the images for a project. He’s so willful, and his ideas are very intense, and he’s very visual. I knew I would learn a lot, and I also knew that because of the structure of this book, we’d have to work visually in a way that, as far as I knew, he’d never done before.
I don’t consider myself a historian; I took a very journalistic approach, and this is a very reported biography. I knew that I would have to spend zillions of hours with Josef and sometimes it would be like herding cats. He was not always ready to talk, and at first he was not at ease speaking about his childhood, his parents… I didn’t even know if he really understood what he'd gotten himself into.
TiP: When was the point at which Koudelka felt he could tell you his story?
Harris: With Josef, one of the big things is that people do what they say they’re going to do. I think he understood that if I said I was going to do something, I would do it. If I made a commitment to him, I would commit. And I understood the same about him. I know it was not an easy decision for him to agree to the biography. I suspect what finally convinced him was when one of his dear friends teased him, saying, “If you don’t do it now, it’s going to happen when you’re dead and then you’ll have no say, and we’ll all make up things about you.”
It’s a courageous act for someone to authorize, let alone collaborate on, a biography. Josef knew I was going to speak to almost everybody still living who mattered to him. And he is a person who is controlling, as most of us are in some way or another. He understood he couldn’t control what they said, and that he could not be censorious in this process. But Josef has no desire whatsoever to censor. He was born in 1938. So, there were the Nazis. There were the communists. There was the Soviet invasion. The last thing he wants to do is tell people what to think, how to think, what to write, how to write. That is not how he is inclined emotionally, creatively, or intellectually. At the same time, he is, as I’ve said previously, controlling, and there are things in this biography that he probably isn’t thrilled with, but he never tried to influence the writing. He was exceptionally respectful. Our agreement was, if somebody said something that was not factually accurate, he would tell me. He would give me the facts. If there were conflicts, I would go back to the person I interviewed. And that’s how we worked. And it was an excellent collaboration in that way. He understood that I wanted what he wanted, which was a very precise and honest rendering of his life. The real test for both of us was when he saw the first draft. For me, it was a test in terms of his reading other people’s recollections or descriptions of events that while factual, he might not appreciate, and my seeing how he dealt with that. And he was a man of his word. He did exactly what he said he was going to do, and didn’t do what he promised he wouldn’t do. I was free.
He was kind of remarkable—he was an excellent, nuanced reader, which I did not expect, mostly because I didn’t know that his English was as good as it turned out to be. As he read, he’d look up words if he didn’t understand them, and then he would say, “Well, why did you use this word here? I’m not sure I understand what this means.” It was a little bit like taking the SATs at a certain point, but it was worth it, because sometimes I actually had to think about the word and then I would go look it up too. More often than not, I understood why it was not making sense to him—he was right. It was not the correct word. So he caught subtle imprecisions in my word choice that nobody else caught. He’s got an engineer’s brain, brushing up against his photographer’s eyes and sensibility. It’s quite extraordinary to work with somebody like this.
Melissa Harris: When I was asked by Susan Meiselas if I would be interested in writing Josef Koudelka’s biography for the Magnum Foundation series that Andy Lewin had initiated with them, I actually didn’t think in a million years that Josef would agree to it. That was my first response to Susan: that I would be extremely surprised if he said yes to the proposal. Of course, I also told Susan that I’d be thrilled to do it, if he was game. It would be an unprecedented opportunity to go deep into his life and consider his work in that personal context as well. With a project like this, you want to end up feeling more about the person and the work than when you started. You don’t want it to go in the other direction. His work is so compelling to me, and what I knew about his life was also fascinating—I was absolutely certain that I would remain intensely engaged.
After Susan and I spoke, I didn’t think that much about it because I really didn’t think Josef would agree. He’s private and has never been someone who likes to speak personally, plus he’s always fervently occupied by his work. To my surprise, I soon found out that he was willing to do the biography, which was great—I got super excited. I’d also never had the opportunity to collaborate with Josef visually on a book, and as this was conceived as a visual biography, I’d finally get to experience that as well. I had worked on his 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague exhibition, which complemented a comprehensive book he was publishing of that work [published in 2008], but he curated that and determined the sequence. I took what he did and essentially came up with an installation concept and presentation. But mostly I’d just helped him with interviews, or worked on texts with him for his books, and I loved the idea of working with Josef on selecting, sequencing, and laying out the images for a project. He’s so willful, and his ideas are very intense, and he’s very visual. I knew I would learn a lot, and I also knew that because of the structure of this book, we’d have to work visually in a way that, as far as I knew, he’d never done before.
I don’t consider myself a historian; I took a very journalistic approach, and this is a very reported biography. I knew that I would have to spend zillions of hours with Josef and sometimes it would be like herding cats. He was not always ready to talk, and at first he was not at ease speaking about his childhood, his parents… I didn’t even know if he really understood what he'd gotten himself into.
TiP: When was the point at which Koudelka felt he could tell you his story?
Harris: With Josef, one of the big things is that people do what they say they’re going to do. I think he understood that if I said I was going to do something, I would do it. If I made a commitment to him, I would commit. And I understood the same about him. I know it was not an easy decision for him to agree to the biography. I suspect what finally convinced him was when one of his dear friends teased him, saying, “If you don’t do it now, it’s going to happen when you’re dead and then you’ll have no say, and we’ll all make up things about you.”
It’s a courageous act for someone to authorize, let alone collaborate on, a biography. Josef knew I was going to speak to almost everybody still living who mattered to him. And he is a person who is controlling, as most of us are in some way or another. He understood he couldn’t control what they said, and that he could not be censorious in this process. But Josef has no desire whatsoever to censor. He was born in 1938. So, there were the Nazis. There were the communists. There was the Soviet invasion. The last thing he wants to do is tell people what to think, how to think, what to write, how to write. That is not how he is inclined emotionally, creatively, or intellectually. At the same time, he is, as I’ve said previously, controlling, and there are things in this biography that he probably isn’t thrilled with, but he never tried to influence the writing. He was exceptionally respectful. Our agreement was, if somebody said something that was not factually accurate, he would tell me. He would give me the facts. If there were conflicts, I would go back to the person I interviewed. And that’s how we worked. And it was an excellent collaboration in that way. He understood that I wanted what he wanted, which was a very precise and honest rendering of his life. The real test for both of us was when he saw the first draft. For me, it was a test in terms of his reading other people’s recollections or descriptions of events that while factual, he might not appreciate, and my seeing how he dealt with that. And he was a man of his word. He did exactly what he said he was going to do, and didn’t do what he promised he wouldn’t do. I was free.
He was kind of remarkable—he was an excellent, nuanced reader, which I did not expect, mostly because I didn’t know that his English was as good as it turned out to be. As he read, he’d look up words if he didn’t understand them, and then he would say, “Well, why did you use this word here? I’m not sure I understand what this means.” It was a little bit like taking the SATs at a certain point, but it was worth it, because sometimes I actually had to think about the word and then I would go look it up too. More often than not, I understood why it was not making sense to him—he was right. It was not the correct word. So he caught subtle imprecisions in my word choice that nobody else caught. He’s got an engineer’s brain, brushing up against his photographer’s eyes and sensibility. It’s quite extraordinary to work with somebody like this.
TiP: Is there a correlation between this idea of truth in photography and truth about ourselves? Because it’s interesting to me that you talk about the factual points. Are facts true, or are facts subjective? If we call them facts, we tend to think that they’re hard and fast. I suppose if it’s a date or a time that’s one thing, but when we start talking about events or interactions, then there are lots of gray areas there. Could you talk a little bit about that relationship? Does Koudelka ever talk about the idea of truth?
Harris: Not exactly in the way that you are talking about it. But truth matters greatly to Josef. He would probably use the word facts more than truth, but they are often, hopefully, interchangeable. Josef is someone who doesn’t trust memory. One of the things that happened in this biography was that he kept wanting to refer to his diaries, because he wanted to remember precisely what he felt at the moment or period under discussion. He did not want to misrepresent, or let time distort or sentimentalize. I would even say to him that I was actually curious about the idea of memory and what he recalled over time, but this did not interest him. For example, when I asked him what it was like the first time he was able to return to Czechoslovakia [in 1990] after twenty years in exile, he went immediately to his diaries, which are detailed and direct. He mostly wrote in Czech, and I don’t speak Czech, so he would read, work out the translation in his mind, and then tell me in English what he’d written. I’m very transparent about our working process in the book: I say when he’s reading from the diaries and he’s interpreting for me, and I say when his daughter is filming, because these are things that are very important to note from a journalistic perspective and for the integrity of the biography. But because of Josef’s own sense that people lie and that words are not always truthful, because of the way he grew up and his own understanding of how memories can be revised and adjusted—even erased—he wanted to be as honest with me as he could be, and to him that meant going back to what he wrote at that moment and how he said he felt then, rather than relying on memory, which he refers to as a “construct.”
Facts are also critical to him when he’s captioning and contextualizing his images. He gives you all the factual information as objectively as possible, deferring to the experts on whatever the project’s subject—from the devastated region near the Czech-German-Polish border in the Foothills of the Ore Mountains, known as the Black Triangle [published in 1994]; to Lime Stone [first published in 2001, and then more comprehensively as Lime in 2012]; to his work in the Israeli and Palestinian landscape as defined by its monolithic and controversial partition, for his project titled Wall [published in 2013]; to the archaeological sites throughout the Mediterranean world comprising his Ruins project [published in 2020].
Harris: Not exactly in the way that you are talking about it. But truth matters greatly to Josef. He would probably use the word facts more than truth, but they are often, hopefully, interchangeable. Josef is someone who doesn’t trust memory. One of the things that happened in this biography was that he kept wanting to refer to his diaries, because he wanted to remember precisely what he felt at the moment or period under discussion. He did not want to misrepresent, or let time distort or sentimentalize. I would even say to him that I was actually curious about the idea of memory and what he recalled over time, but this did not interest him. For example, when I asked him what it was like the first time he was able to return to Czechoslovakia [in 1990] after twenty years in exile, he went immediately to his diaries, which are detailed and direct. He mostly wrote in Czech, and I don’t speak Czech, so he would read, work out the translation in his mind, and then tell me in English what he’d written. I’m very transparent about our working process in the book: I say when he’s reading from the diaries and he’s interpreting for me, and I say when his daughter is filming, because these are things that are very important to note from a journalistic perspective and for the integrity of the biography. But because of Josef’s own sense that people lie and that words are not always truthful, because of the way he grew up and his own understanding of how memories can be revised and adjusted—even erased—he wanted to be as honest with me as he could be, and to him that meant going back to what he wrote at that moment and how he said he felt then, rather than relying on memory, which he refers to as a “construct.”
Facts are also critical to him when he’s captioning and contextualizing his images. He gives you all the factual information as objectively as possible, deferring to the experts on whatever the project’s subject—from the devastated region near the Czech-German-Polish border in the Foothills of the Ore Mountains, known as the Black Triangle [published in 1994]; to Lime Stone [first published in 2001, and then more comprehensively as Lime in 2012]; to his work in the Israeli and Palestinian landscape as defined by its monolithic and controversial partition, for his project titled Wall [published in 2013]; to the archaeological sites throughout the Mediterranean world comprising his Ruins project [published in 2020].
All this to say, I think that factual precision—which you could also call truth—is extremely important to him. It’s how he contextualizes everything that he does. And it was important to me in writing Next as well.
Think of all the elements comprising this biography: Josef’s work—and all the backstories regarding not just the making of the work, but also the books and exhibitions that followed—along with the biographical images of and by him. I interviewed so many people involved with the projects and events making up his life and work and read piles of correspondence and essays… there were so many checks and balances to the storytelling in this way. And of course, there may be slight variations to people’s memories at times, but I don’t think there was ever a challenge where somebody said something and Josef said that never happened, or Josef recalled an event and then in subsequent interviews, somebody else remembered it so differently that I had to go back to Josef and question him on what he told me.
TiP: It’s interesting the way in which storytelling relates to photographs. To some extent he is telling the story of making certain images. And it’s interesting to see them side by side in a certain way. To connect those. What we see and frame in the world is shaped by who we are as a person. And then there’s the whole issue of where do art and life divide, or do they? What we are seeing is shaped by who we are and where we came from, and there is a reluctance to want to talk about where you came from for photographers; they want their photographs to stand front and center, not their lives.
Think of all the elements comprising this biography: Josef’s work—and all the backstories regarding not just the making of the work, but also the books and exhibitions that followed—along with the biographical images of and by him. I interviewed so many people involved with the projects and events making up his life and work and read piles of correspondence and essays… there were so many checks and balances to the storytelling in this way. And of course, there may be slight variations to people’s memories at times, but I don’t think there was ever a challenge where somebody said something and Josef said that never happened, or Josef recalled an event and then in subsequent interviews, somebody else remembered it so differently that I had to go back to Josef and question him on what he told me.
TiP: It’s interesting the way in which storytelling relates to photographs. To some extent he is telling the story of making certain images. And it’s interesting to see them side by side in a certain way. To connect those. What we see and frame in the world is shaped by who we are as a person. And then there’s the whole issue of where do art and life divide, or do they? What we are seeing is shaped by who we are and where we came from, and there is a reluctance to want to talk about where you came from for photographers; they want their photographs to stand front and center, not their lives.
Harris: This book is text driven, and it’s not strictly chronological. There are many individuals to be introduced, and several projects to which Josef returns over time. He’s traditionally presented his images in a certain chronological order within categories and/or projects, and he most likely imagined that was what was going to happen with the biography until we got a little further in. Sometimes the images are presented this way, but often he had to think about a relationship between text and image that he’d rarely if ever had to previously consider—to allow for photographs from disparate bodies of work, and also biographical pictures, to relate because of their content and relationship to the text, as opposed to their chronological and/or formal relationships with each other. He didn’t resist, because he loves the challenge of doing something new. And that’s why it’s super fun and inspiring to work with him. He first just had to understand what I was hoping to achieve and why, and then he flew with it—the picture research as well.
The formal considerations, or how the spread looked, would not be secondary, but would be the second step after first selecting our visual possibilities, determined by the text. I don’t consider the images to be illustrations—subservient to the text—because they’re not. They are each independent. The text and images coexist with each other, and they inform each other. But in this particular case, the driving force is the text.
By the time we were deep into the layout—which we worked on together with his longtime Czech designer, Aleš Najbrt who, in collaboration with Josef, came up with the book’s format, font, design template, etc.—Josef was vigilant about the image placement in relation to the text.
TiP: In terms of photographing a certain kind of protest or conflict situation, one has to make decisions regarding what you photograph and what the ethics are related to what you’re photographing. Did Koudelka talk about ethics?
Harris: Not in that way. You have to remember that really the only time Josef was photographing a conflict situation where he had to respond very quickly and had to totally trust his instincts was in August 1968 when the Soviets invaded Prague. Otherwise, he has been able to return repeatedly to places—as he’s wanted to, with most of his other projects—giving him a certain amount of time to figure out how to most successfully realize the project as he envisions. I believe that ethics to him would involve a kind of authenticity—a deeply considered evocation of what he is seeing, not manipulating what he is seeing. But of course, it’s always subjective. People make choices, and you cherry-pick when you’re photographing like you cherry-pick what you write. You decide to focus this way versus that way, or you move in or you pull back, or you include this little anecdote or you don’t include that anecdote, this detail and not that detail. There’s truth by omission and truth by inclusion… You could say that everything is subjective in that sense because you’re always making choices. But I think it is elemental to Josef to not lie, to not misrepresent. Behaving correctly, as Josef might put it, matters to him.
Does that mean he’s always been perfect? Of course not. Nobody is. But his work has always had a fidelity to the situation, to what he is seeing and understanding, and is contextualized as such in his projects, and in this biography. There are moments he has especially appreciated the evidentiary value of his images. For example, the images of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague.
The formal considerations, or how the spread looked, would not be secondary, but would be the second step after first selecting our visual possibilities, determined by the text. I don’t consider the images to be illustrations—subservient to the text—because they’re not. They are each independent. The text and images coexist with each other, and they inform each other. But in this particular case, the driving force is the text.
By the time we were deep into the layout—which we worked on together with his longtime Czech designer, Aleš Najbrt who, in collaboration with Josef, came up with the book’s format, font, design template, etc.—Josef was vigilant about the image placement in relation to the text.
TiP: In terms of photographing a certain kind of protest or conflict situation, one has to make decisions regarding what you photograph and what the ethics are related to what you’re photographing. Did Koudelka talk about ethics?
Harris: Not in that way. You have to remember that really the only time Josef was photographing a conflict situation where he had to respond very quickly and had to totally trust his instincts was in August 1968 when the Soviets invaded Prague. Otherwise, he has been able to return repeatedly to places—as he’s wanted to, with most of his other projects—giving him a certain amount of time to figure out how to most successfully realize the project as he envisions. I believe that ethics to him would involve a kind of authenticity—a deeply considered evocation of what he is seeing, not manipulating what he is seeing. But of course, it’s always subjective. People make choices, and you cherry-pick when you’re photographing like you cherry-pick what you write. You decide to focus this way versus that way, or you move in or you pull back, or you include this little anecdote or you don’t include that anecdote, this detail and not that detail. There’s truth by omission and truth by inclusion… You could say that everything is subjective in that sense because you’re always making choices. But I think it is elemental to Josef to not lie, to not misrepresent. Behaving correctly, as Josef might put it, matters to him.
Does that mean he’s always been perfect? Of course not. Nobody is. But his work has always had a fidelity to the situation, to what he is seeing and understanding, and is contextualized as such in his projects, and in this biography. There are moments he has especially appreciated the evidentiary value of his images. For example, the images of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague.
The images are, he tells me, “proof of what happened.” In subsequent years, Koudelka would encounter Soviet soldiers who had participated in the invasion of Prague, and who continued to insist that they had come to liberate Czechoslovakia. When he takes issue with this assertion, reminding them of the bloodshed, he says, these ex-soldiers often deny that any killing took place. “So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say: ‘Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.’ And they have to believe me.” ~Excerpt from Josef Koudelka: Next |
TiP: Revisiting a place is really important, to understand it and appreciate it. I see in his work that he feels a certain responsibility to the place or the event or the situation. And that’s the reason he revisits it. He doesn’t want to just be a tourist.
Harris: Josef wants to make the best possible photograph. He is such an extreme perfectionist. That’s almost an understatement. So he revisits places over and over again, often over many years, to be sure he can’t make a given image better. He keeps copious notes about the time of day he photographed something, what the light was like, the time of year, the date, everything. The Turkish photographer and filmmaker Coşkun Aşar, who helped Josef when he was photographing archaeological sites in Turkey for Ruins, took some images of him working. You can see Josef staring at a site that he’s about to photograph and looking at what he’s done previously. Has he made the best possible image of this place? Has he done all that he can do?
Harris: Josef wants to make the best possible photograph. He is such an extreme perfectionist. That’s almost an understatement. So he revisits places over and over again, often over many years, to be sure he can’t make a given image better. He keeps copious notes about the time of day he photographed something, what the light was like, the time of year, the date, everything. The Turkish photographer and filmmaker Coşkun Aşar, who helped Josef when he was photographing archaeological sites in Turkey for Ruins, took some images of him working. You can see Josef staring at a site that he’s about to photograph and looking at what he’s done previously. Has he made the best possible image of this place? Has he done all that he can do?
TiP: What makes the perfect photograph? You think of Cartier-Bresson, who talked about the decisive moment, but this isn’t the decisive moment. This is a contemplative moment. You’re looking at what you did in relationship to what you’re doing. That’s different. So how does Koudelka know? What are the factors for him?
Harris: Josef is looking at the light, he’s considering the framing, he’s considering all the obvious choices that photographers weigh when making a picture. While at some level this constellation of considerations is second nature to him, he’s still always consciously questioning and examining what he might do today, in relation to what he did before. Eventually, he hits a point where he decides he can’t do it any better—and what that point is, that's elemental to him. I don’t know if he could articulate it, because it’s intuitive. It’s instinctive, even visceral. It’s a lot of things that words may not serve terribly well. But he just knows.
Harris: Josef is looking at the light, he’s considering the framing, he’s considering all the obvious choices that photographers weigh when making a picture. While at some level this constellation of considerations is second nature to him, he’s still always consciously questioning and examining what he might do today, in relation to what he did before. Eventually, he hits a point where he decides he can’t do it any better—and what that point is, that's elemental to him. I don’t know if he could articulate it, because it’s intuitive. It’s instinctive, even visceral. It’s a lot of things that words may not serve terribly well. But he just knows.
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