Spain
- Artist: Josef Koudelka
- Date: 1975
- Medium: Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
- Dimensions: image: 361 × 540 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “Spain” by Josef Koudelka. A black‑and‑white gelatin‑silver print from 1975, it sits inside his “Exiles” series that chronicles his life after leaving Czechoslovakia for political asylum in Britain in 1970. Koudelka travelled across Europe – Portugal, France, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland – following folk festivals from spring to autumn, printing in London each winter.
In “Spain” the photographer turns the camera on himself, capturing only his legs and feet resting beside a tree in Andalusia. It’s a quiet, almost meditative self‑portrait that contrasts with many of his other works, which focus on the margins of society – Roma camps, carnival crowds, solitary wanderers. The image invites us to consider exile not only as a physical displacement but as a continual search for belonging, a theme that threads through the entire series.
The photograph’s stark contrasts and subtle grain give it a timeless quality, echoing the restless, itinerant life Koudelka led during the 1970s.
See it in person
Spain is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
