Location: Pamplona, Spain
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Framing: Mounted on board
Signature: Unsigned
This photograph belongs to Koudelka's important Spanish work of the 1970s and focuses on a festive scene in Pamplona. The juxtaposition of a Citroen 2CV with a costumed figure wearing an oversized carnival head creates an image that is at once absurd, humorous, and faintly estranged, turning an ordinary street into a charged theatrical stage. It preserves the spontaneity of street photography while revealing Koudelka's enduring sensitivity to ritual, marginal experience, and social performance. Koudelka photographed the festivities in Pamplona repeatedly between 1972 and 1978.
Josef Koudelka (b. 1938) is a major Czech-born, later naturalized French photographer. After photographing the Prague Spring in 1968, he left Czechoslovakia for political asylum in 1970 and soon joined Magnum Photos. Living and traveling in a condition of near-exile for many years, he went on to produce the landmark bodies of work Gypsies and Exiles, securing his place as one of the defining photographers of the postwar era.