I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more
Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926)
Those tombstones piled on top of each other like desperate drunks at last call, twelve thousand bodies crammed into what, a few acres? Twelve layers deep in some spots. Because when you’re forbidden from expanding, you dig down, you stack up, you make it work in the cramped nightmare reality deals you.
And Kafka knew. Of course he knew. “I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.” That’s not romance, that’s oblivion as mercy. That’s the ultimate privacy in a world that won’t leave you alone even in death.
I’m in Prague so naturally Kundera’s haunting me, Unbearable Lightness, Tereza and the weight of images as evidence that any of this matters, and suddenly I’m face-to-face with Koudelka. The man who shot Prague like it was already a ghost story before it even happened. Josef Koudelka photographs this stuff like it’s the last transmission from a dying civilization, which, let’s be honest, it kind of was. No pretty lighting, no National Geographic soft-focus horseshit. Just stone and shadow and the accumulated weight of centuries pressing down on your chest until you can barely breathe. His photos of Prague in 1968 make you feel the claustrophobia of history, the way it suffocates and preserves simultaneously.
This is what great photography like Koudelka’s does: the work doesn’t comfort. The work confronts. The says: here, look at this beautiful terrible thing and try to sleep tonight.
Prague, Czech Republic