“To be in exile simply means having left your own country and being unable to return. Every exile is a different personal experience. I wanted to see the world and photograph it. I have been travelling for forty-five years. I never stayed anywhere for more than three months. When I found nothing more to photograph, it was time to leave,” Czech photographer Josef Koudelka said in a 2015 interview with Le Monde.
 
Koudelka's life has been marked by relentless restlessness, constant travel and a resistance to settling down. Having turned to photography full-time in the late 1960s, he photographed the Soviet invasion of Prague and published his pictures under the initials P. P., “Prague Photographer”, fearing reprisals against himself and his family. In 1969, he anonymously received the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Gold Medal for these photographs. He left Czechoslovakia seeking political asylum in 1970 and joined Magnum Photos shortly afterwards. His continuing exile began; he remained stateless until becoming a French citizen in 1987.
 
Magnum offered both friends and a network of people who helped him and provided places to stay during his travels. Yet Koudelka did not work as a conventional agency photographer: he declined assignments, preferring to travel and pursue his own investigations. He photographed Roma communities, minorities and things threatened with disappearance, with being “exiled” in some way, in a lifelong photographic journey.
 
“For fifteen years I worked for nobody. I never accepted assignments or took photographs for money. I photographed only for myself. I lived on the bare minimum. I did not need much: a good sleeping bag and some clothes—a pair of shoes, two pairs of socks and one pair of trousers for a year. A jacket and two shirts lasted me three years,” Koudelka explained to Czech writer Karel Hvíždala in a conversation published in the 2002 book Josef Koudelka.