Czech photographer Josef Koudelka at work in a screenshot from the 2019 documentary Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land directed by Gilad Baram. (Nowhere Films)
The Darkroom Rumour is a streaming platform that “aims to be a sanctuary for all photography lovers.” The site says it is the “brainchild” of director Thomas Goupille, “working with…a film historian, a producer, a web professional, graphic designers and teachers” to aggregate documentaries and ancillary materials about well-known photographers.
I have been getting ads for the site on social media. Their trailers for films about figures such as Josef Koudelka, a Czech-French photographer, and Joel Meyerowitz, an American, made me curious. Darkroom Rumour has a seven-day free trial, with three subscription choices if you choose to continue, including one for students or those with other economic hardship.
(Costs are listed in Euros, so you might want to have a look before the Trump administration enacts its suddenly-conceived [and surely unenforceable except with blunt tools] 100% tariff on movies “produced” outside the United States, an act it considers “a National Security threat.”)
On an online forum for professional photographers, a man said of the Darkroom Rumour collection, “I watched the one about the Czech photographer in Israel and the West Bank—a topical subject, but the film was made before the present war. It was very slow, and over the course of the hour I found myself jumping ahead a little here and there. I imagine the films will be of mixed quality, but they are really from the photographer’s perspective, which is uncommon and welcome. I’ll try a few more on my week’s trial.”
Exactly so. The documentary he describes is Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land, directed by Gilad Baram (2019). Koudelka has been a working photographer for almost sixty years and has been in the Magnum Photos stable since his work during the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague brought him world attention. He has won important prizes, had dozens of books published in several countries, and had exhibitions at dozens of galleries and museums, including MoMA.
The scenes in the documentary are from visits he was invited to make, from 2008 to 2012, to the Israeli and Palestinian landscape. Photos from these visits were published first in Koudelka’s book Wall. The documentary was an unexpected by-product, for Gilad Baram, then a student of photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, who was assigned to be Koudelka’s assistant.
Koudelka thought he might be a political minder and spy instead. Koudelka says he had not wanted to go to Israel, because he is from Europe, feels European, and did not want to “mix [his] mind up.” Whether he worries or does not worry about the conflict there makes no difference, he says.
Once there, he engages the landscape at a deep level and is shown having respectful interactions, to the limits of their mutual languages, with both Israelis and Palestinians, in which he speaks of his own experience living behind the Iron Curtain.
“One wall, two jails,” he says sympathetically to a Palestinian woman.
The documentary is 72 minutes long but could be a third shorter. Koudelka’s method is often to stand or sit quietly waiting for a composition to present itself to him—here, in a desert, looking over a simulated city built for urban combat training; there, next to some brutalist retention wall that looks like a pyroclastic flow. These are long scenes. He wears a field jacket and muddy boots and changes out film rolls from one of his two large cameras. It takes a while.
There are often no other people in view; Koudelka is after shapes, light, and shadow, even (or especially) in the contrast of hills and rolls of razor wire. Anyone hoping to go to Darkroom Rumour to hear Koudelka offer Masterclass-style advice will be disappointed.
In fact, he says little for most of the film, except for asides such as, “What a shit. How people can do something like that to beautiful landscape?” It’s not really a question, and there is no follow-up.
It has to be said that, as a rule, it can be almost as boring to watch professional photographers work as it is to watch a writer draft. (Please see this piece I wrote about working with NYC street photographer Donato DiCamillo, who is unusually gregarious.) Photographers futz with their gear, look around distractedly, search for their lens cloth, display physical tics, and make bold moves for no apparent reason. You are often in their way. When they settle into the fine-motor skills of taking a shot, you have only a rough idea of what they are doing compositionally. If the shot is on film, there is nothing to see immediately, and if it is digital, the image on the back of the camera might be tiny, and is likely a RAW picture file that will be corrected and cropped later anyway.
In the documentary, we get to see a photographer with the perfectionism of a master and the patience of a saint. Koudelka has lived a life of discomfort and often danger for his art. We see him endure a hailstorm on a mountain, caring for his cameras first. We watch nervous soldiers watch and sometimes shout at him, and officious gatekeepers argue against his presence. He works around Palestinians who do not speak Hebrew; in subtitles we see they are saying on the phone that they hope he will go. Kids follow him, puzzled, titillated, and slightly threatening. Like a soldier, who needs to know he has all his stuff in case he has to flee, Koudelka takes off his ball cap and puts it in his jacket pocket before he works on the next shot.
But we do get to see many of his astonishing photographs, some but not all coinciding with what we saw him framing. Near the end of the film he speaks at greater length.
“I was extremely lucky that I grow up in Czechoslovakia,” he says [all sic], “in the country that was not very rich, the country where there was not much freedom, and a country in which I couldn’t travel. So, suddenly I found myself out of that country. I lost my friends. I lost my family. I lost certain background, the folk music, the playing, singing. All these things which you lose if you leave your country. And I decided not to cry, and on the contrary, I decided to use it for my advantage. To build a new life and to see the world, which I couldn’t do in Czechoslovakia. […]
“If you travel…you are this guy, you are different, but in the same time you know that it is very important [to] try to stay different. Not to conform yourself, to keep the healthy anger, to keep it as long as possible.”
“[T]o come on [a] place and to feel: in this place there is a picture waiting for me. And to go there as many times [until] you get it.”
Anyone can go to a place and see what he sees, he insists, but it will never be the same place. This seems to be a first principle for Koudelka. “I can go around and show some people what they maybe haven’t seen,” he says of his work in the Holy Land.
