In 2008, I spent a few days with Josef Koudelka in Prague, the city he had immortalised in photographs 40 years previously as Russian tanks rolled into its streets on the evening of 20 August 1968. He had only recently returned to his homeland, and was about to be belatedly honoured with an exhibition of his photographs from that pivotal moment, a mere fraction of the 5,000 he shot in the first week of the invasion.
It was the first time they had been shown there and, unsurprisingly, he was in a reflective mood. “For a long time no one here was interested in remembering,” he told me, “but now I think they start to remember again.”
