Above: Rachel’s Tomb.Below: Josef Koudelka photographing
a mural of Palestine poet Mahmoud
Darwish, East Jerusalem.Josef^ Koudelka^ /MagnumPhotosGiladBaramthat I was courageous. I was simply in a bit
of a trance. I took pictures and I did what
I thought I should be doing.
During your shoots in Israel, an Israeli
soldier broke one of your cameras –
can you tell us that story?
We were photographing in East Jerusalem.
It was around noon, and we were hungry. So
we took our sandwiches that we had brought
with us. There was this small park, and so
we sat down and ate. And, in one moment,
we found ourselves surrounded by
seven soldiers with machine guns.
They approached us quite harshly.
One of them, the youngest one, came
towards me and hit my camera from the top
[in a downwards chopping motion], and what
I didn’t know then was that he actually broke
it. So I kept photographing for a week
and there was nothing [no pictures].
I must say that I owe Gilad (Baram) a lot,
since he got me out of many situations that
could have ended strangely. Gilad then began
to talk to the soldiers and things calmed down
a little. He talked to them in English and then
they sent him – our car was parked a little
further away – to fetch the car papers. When
he came back with the papers, they said, “Hey,
you are a local! Why don’t you speak in Hebrew
with us?” Well... And Gilad, he really can find
his way out [of situations]. He turned to me
and said, ‘Look at this man, I’m responsible
for him, and I want him to understand it all.’
What was interesting about this incident is
that the soldier who broke my camera – who
was, you could say, the rudest one... When
I looked at him, he had exactly the same
kind of face like those soldiers, the Russian
soldiers whom I photographed in 1968.
And those [soldiers] did not manage
to break my camera back then.You say that you aren’t political, but there
are quite a lot of people who look at your
work and say that it’s very political.
Nobody, with the exception of Gilles
Peress about Prague, told me thatJosef Koudelka
http://www.digitalcameraworld.com MARCH 2020 DIGITAL CAMERA^137