EXILES

Published by: Aperture, New York, 2014
Hardcover, 180 pages
30.2 × 27.4 × 2.3 cm
Language: English
Condition: Brand New. Completely clean, tight, and pristine; no visible wear.

Exiles remains one of Josef Koudelka’s most haunting and essential photobooks a stark and deeply human portrait of displacement, solitude, and the restless search for belonging. As Cornell Capa once wrote, Koudelka’s “unsentimental, stark, brooding, intensely human imagery reflects his own spirit, the very essence of an exile who is at home wherever his wandering body finds haven in the night.”

This newly revised and expanded edition of the 1988 classic includes ten additional images and a new commentary in conversation with Robert Delpire. Across these photographs made throughout Koudelka’s years of wandering across Europe and Great Britain after fleeing Czechoslovakia in 1968 unfold scenes of private mystery, quiet violence, devotion, estrangement, and desire.

The images in Exiles reveal a world simultaneously intimate and distant, poetic and severe. They reflect a life lived in transit, registering alienation, disconnection, and the fragile architecture of human attachment. Koudelka’s fierce urge “to see” animates each frame, offering a visual testimony to some of the twentieth century’s most profound themes: migration, identity, rupture, and the emotional terrain of being unrooted.

Decades after its first publication, Exiles remains as resonant as ever an urgent mirror to our contemporary moment marked by displacement and global movement. This edition preserves the gravity, beauty, and unsettling clarity of Koudelka’s vision.