Time for a riot: how the art of 1968 caught a world in turmoil
returned to Czechoslovakia from Romania, where he had been
living among and photographing Romany Gypsies. The following day, Soviet tanks
appeared on the streets of Prague. For seven days, the 30-year-old
Moravian-born photographer roamed the city with his East German Exakta Varex
camera loaded with movie film, the only stock he could find at short notice. The
resulting images, some of which were smuggled out of the country, but many
of which were not seen until decades later, captured the tumult of a
traumatised city. They are recognised as one of the most powerful
photo-journalistic essays of the 20th century.
Koudelka photographed
teenagers blocking the paths of Soviet tanks, old people imploring the young
Soviet soldiers to return home, flag-waving youths clambering over army
vehicles. He returned to his apartment only to find more film or succumb to
exhaustion. His images of defiance have, in the interim, become infused with a
romantic, even elegiac quality. Their atmosphere is echoed in photographs of
more recent upheavals, most notably the Arab Spring protests.
Everything is
uncertain except the hand of a passerby curled into a fist – and the hands of a
watch
This image, which he
titled Hand and Wristwatch, is of a different order: a singular
moment of calm and stillness. Here, there is no movement, no noise, only the
almost empty street and that anonymous arm in the foreground, stretching out
into the frame. It captures not just the moment the troops entered Prague but
also the eerie atmosphere of an entire city and country helplessly losing its
sense of itself. Look closely and you
can see a small group of people who have left their work to gather on the
pavement. In the background, those blurry vehicles may be tanks. Everything is
uncertain here except the hand of a passerby, curled into a fist, and the hands
of the watch that signal the moment when everything changed utterly for the
citizens of the invaded city.
This may be Koudelka’s only conceptual
photograph, but it resonates as an iconic image of a tumultuous political
moment in which there is no tumult – only an eerie silence in which time itself
seems to have come to a halt. Sean O’Hagan.
Music: ‘The sound of hippy idealism curdling’: The events of 1968
took some time to percolate through pop: it wasn’t until a year later
that Thunderclap
Newman would reach No 1 with a song urging the listener to “hand out
the arms and ammo … because the revolution’s here”, and that a mood of increasing
militancy would really start being reflected by black artists. Of the musicians
who did react quickly to 1968’s tumult, the Rolling Stones were audibly
re-energised and the Beatles baffled – “you can count me out … in,” sang John
Lennon on Revolution. The most incendiary music made in immediate response to
the year’s events, a recording of Nina
Simone performing at the Westbury Music Fair three days after Martin
Luther King’s assassination, was bowdlerised before being released, not least
to remove the sound of Simone urging the audience to avenge King’s death by any
means: “I ain’t about to be non-violent, honey.”.. read more:
