Josef Koudelka: Invasion 68
Over the last 10 years, Najbrt’s main body of work has been long-term co-operation with Josef Koudelka, where he helped prepare the legendary Gypsies for printing and fundamentally influenced the book form of Invasion 68. Rather than a photo book, which often means a bound portfolio of individual photographs without an underlying context, Koudelka imagined a publication that would respect the original documentary purpose of the photographs. He brought almost 10 thousand frames to Prague and Najbrt approached the material as a newsreel. Apart from horizontal spreads and vertical photographs on a full page, he filled the pages with four or even sixteen photographs. Rather than isolated shots, it was the action, sequence and context that came to the forefront. “The first tanks arrive in the morning, people gathering, looking on. The culmination of the book is coming, the battle at the Czech Radio, the empty Wenceslas Square, a convention of the Communist Party… Then the situation calms down: at the end an old woman is painting over writings on the wall,” Najbrt describes. The graphic design using bold letters referred to period newspapers and magazines, in which the photographs were originally published. The grey “waste paper” with special rough texture, which Najbrt conceived of for the cover, was made by a Moravian company producing flypaper.
2008 Aleš Najbrt
Production estimated up to 14 days, the possibility of printing sizes S to XL
price 400 CZK