Josef Koudelka, a nomad who 'shapes the world' with his camera lens

Forty-five years after capturing the Soviet invasion of Prague, Czech-born photographer Josef Koudelka says he is more interested in "shaping the world" with his camera lens than in front-page events.

"A photographer's work is to have an opinion about things, about the world, and to react to the world," Koudelka, 75, said in an interview in French with AFP in Bucharest where an exhibition of his pictures has opened.

"What I do is look through my viewer and try to shape the world. As I do this, the world too is shaping me," he added.

The white-bearded, blue-eyed photographer said that in every country where he has travelled he was after events and people that were not necessarily newsworthy.

"The important thing is that I have touched upon the major topics of my times," he said, citing the gypsies, or Roma, as a subject to which he devoted himself in the 1960s, as well as environment-related topics.

Koudelka said his latest book, "The Wall", comprising panoramic landscape photos he made between 2008 and 2012 along the barrier separating Israel and the Palestinian territories, "is not pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel but against the way man treats the Earth".

"To me, this wall is a crime against the landscape. People can defend themselves but the landscape cannot. There you have a landscape that is holy to a large part of mankind and they are destroying it," he said.

A self-confessed nomad who emigrated from then Czechoslovakia in 1970, Koudelka said he had never lived for more than three months in one country over the past 40 years.

"I don't really feel like a citizen of any country. I'm not Czech like the Czechs, and I have a French passport but I don't feel French like the French."

"Luckily, because I don't want to be like the others."

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Copyright AFP, 2013.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/131021/josef-koudelka-nomad-who-shapes-the-world-his-camera-lens