The impressive journey of Koudelka back to our roots in the Mediterranean sea
An extraordinary journey in our sea, the Mediterranean, in our past, its archeology to the present, in our attitude in being in a continuous search for our roots to be able to move forward.
The most awaited new book by the Master of Photography Josef Koudelka is an unprecedented reportage: thirty years of photographs taken in nineteen different Mediterranean countries and more than one hundred archaeological sites in Roman and Greek history.
This work – images of great beauty – does not only intend to document history but it wants to recover the meaning of a world that we risk to lose.
In the nineteenth century Romantic painters loved ruins and they painted them in the glory of the deepest nostalgia. Josef Koudelka, on the other hand, does not cultivate nostalgia. For him the ruins are exciting remains of what is about to die: signs of what is happening now. He thinks that the art should recover the value and the meaning in our present: the Europe was born with its founding values inside this ‘common sea’.
Koudelka’s cultural research was defined by the well-known archaeologist Alain Schnapp as a unique journey because nobody before him had tried with such obstinacy to provide such a complete representation of what remains of our ancient history: vestiges, ruins, works of art and remains of the past.
Turning the rubble into hope is the Josef Koudelka’s ambition through this extraordinary photographic journey.
