Along the Wall

In this episode of Photography and Walking, Philippe Guillaume explores Josef Koudelka’s photographs of the barrier that separates Israel and Palestine. Photographed between 2008 and 2012, the series traces the wall across hills, orchards, roads, and neighbourhoods.
Rather than presenting the structure as a single dramatic event, Koudelka approaches it through repetition and movement. Working with panoramic photographs and returning to the region repeatedly over four years, he reveals the wall slowly, as something that stretches beyond the limits of any single frame.
Walking becomes central to the work. The photographs accumulate presence through time, showing how a political decision hardens into concrete, wire, and shadow and begins to reorganize the rhythms of everyday life.
This episode reflects on how photography and walking together make it possible to approach such a structure not through spectacle, but through duration.

Dans cet épisode de Photography and Walking, Philippe Guillaume explore les photographies que Josef Koudelka a prises de la barrière séparant Israël et la Palestine. Prises entre 2008 et 2012, elles suivent le mur à travers des collines, des vergers, des routes et des quartiers.
Plutôt que de présenter la structure comme un événement spectaculaire, Koudelka l’aborde par la répétition et le déplacement. Travaillant avec un appareil panoramique et revenant plusieurs fois dans la région sur une période de quatre ans, il révèle progressivement le mur, comme quelque chose qui dépasse toujours les limites d’une seule image.
La marche devient centrale dans ce travail. Les photographies accumulent une présence dans le temps et montrent comment une décision politique se matérialise en béton, en grillage et en ombre, réorganisant peu à peu les rythmes de la vie quotidienne.
Cet épisode réfléchit à la manière dont la photographie et la marche permettent d’aborder une telle structure non pas par le spectacle, mais par la durée.

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Music: Beat ’em with Rhythm - Victor Natas (CC BY 4.0 / freesound.org)
Produced by Productions 3655 Inc.   

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

In the previous episode, we stayed close to a wall in Paris. Close enough to wonder whether it was day or night, close enough to mistake a scratch for a face, a mark for a figure. In this episode, the wall is no longer ambiguous. It is not symbolic or accidental or even half imagined. It is measured, engineered, repeated. It cuts through hills, roads, orchids, even neighborhoods. Between two thousand and eight and two thousand twelve, Josef Kudelka walked alongside the barrier that separates Israel and Palestine. He photographed it not as an event, but as presence. This wall is named differently depending on who speaks. Some call it a security fence, separation barrier, apartheid wall. Each name carries its own weight. In this episode, I don't want to try to resolve those names. Instead, I want to stay close to the photographs, and to the land they cross, and follow what becomes visible when a structure like this is approached slowly, on foot, and over time. When a political decision hardens into concrete, wire and shadow, and begins to reorganize daily life, movement, and sight itself. This is Photography and Walking, I'm Filipine. When Joseph Kudelka began photographing the wall that separates Israel and Palestine, he did not approach it as a sudden event. There is no decisive moment here, and no single image that claims to summarize what this structure means. Instead the wall appears as something that has already settled into the land, something that repeats, stretches, bends, and returns. This is important, because the wall Kudelka photographs is not only an interruption, it is an installation. It crosses hills and valleys, skirts neighborhoods, slices through orchards, runs parallel to roads, then abruptly breaks away from them. Sometimes it stands as a massive concrete barrier, grey and vertical. Sometimes it thins into fencing and wire. Sometimes it disappears briefly, only to reassert itself further on. In Kudelka's panoramic photographs, the wall does not dominate the frame by force, and it is rarely even centered. Instead it insists through duration. You feel it through movement and repetition, photograph after photograph, rather than through a single commanding view. Kudelka approaches the wall, withdraws from it, looks at it obliquely, shifts his position, and returns over time. The wall is never pinned down, it keeps resisting being taken in all at once. He did not arrive at this project suddenly, nor did he arrive as a journalist sent to explain a conflict. By the time he began this series, between 2008 and 2012, Kudelka had already spent decades living in a condition of displacement. Born in Moravia in 1938, he trained first as an aeronautical engineer before turning seriously to photography in the early 1960s. He photographed theater, then turned his attention to the Roma communities of Czechoslovakia, not initially out of political intent, but out of fascination with music, movement, and ways of living that existed outside enclosure. That resistance would later become central. In 1968, when Soviet troops invaded Prague, Kudelka photographed the occupation from inside the city. Those pictures were smuggled out and published anonymously under the initials PP, Prague Photographer, out of fear of reprisals. Soon after, Kudelka left Czechoslovakia and entered a prolonged state of exile. He would eventually join Magnum Photos, invited first as an associate member, and later supported by figures who recognized both the intensity and the independence of his vision. One of those figures was Henri Cartier Bresson. Cartier Bresson did not shape Kudelka stylistically. If anything, their photographs are profoundly different. But he understood something essential, that Kudelka needed freedom, material, spatial, and temporal, in order to work. He helped secure cameras for him, he helped bring him into Magnum, not as a disciple, but as someone whose way of moving through the world required protection rather than direction. That distinction matters, because Kudelka's work is not about control or visual conquest. It is grounded in discipline and mastery, but it unfolds through persistence, through return, endurance, and time spent alongside what often is not resolved. By the time he began photographing the wall, Kudelka was already a consummate walker, someone for whom travel was not a project phase, but a condition of life. He slept outdoors, he lived lightly, he returned again and again to the same places. For the wall project, he travelled to Israel and the West Bank seven times over four years. Seven returns. This repetition is crucial. It means the photographs are not impressions, they are accumulations. But before any of this is photographed, before it enters a frame, the wall is already spoken about. It is named. Israel calls it a security fence. Palestinians call it an apartheid wall. Human rights organizations often use the term separation barrier. Each name frames the structure differently, each implies a logic, a justification, a moral horizon. Kudelka does not choose between them. Instead he photographs what all these terms point toward a human decision made permanent in a landscape. In his photographs, the wall is not dramatic in the way we might expect. There are no confrontations, no crowds, no gestures aimed at the camera. Often there is simply land. Rocky hills, sparse vegetation, agricultural terraces, roads that seem to hesitate at times before meeting the barrier. The wall enters these spaces as something foreign, not because it is visible, but because it does not belong to the rhythms that are already there. It does not erode naturally. Even when it curves, it does so mechanically, as if resisting the land rather than responding to it. It cuts. And yet even here, Kudelka does not give spectacle the last word. The panoramic format shapes how the barrier is perceived, sometimes as a distant horizon, sometimes as a sequence of incursions across the land. In certain photos, especially from elevated viewpoints, the wall appears almost serpentine, a long body cutting across the landscape. Now the format can be spectacular, but the wide frame does not offer liberation. Instead, it emphasizes how the wall stretches beyond the limits of the image, how it exceeds any single point of view. You're never given the whole, and in many instances Kudelka places us beside it, moving with it step by step. In the opening pages of the book that came out of the project, a caption notes that if completed as planned, the wall would extend for approximately seven hundred kilometers. The number is almost abstract at first. It becomes graspable through movement, through walking. This is where photography and walking become essential. Kudelka does not photograph the wall as an object encountered once. He photographs it as something that must be endured through movement. Walking here is not metaphorical. It is practical, physical, slow, and repetitive. In various sequences from filmmaker Gilad Baram's documentary Kudelka Shooting Holy Land, we see Kudelka climbing over rough ground, crouching low and even lying on his side to peer through an opening. He waits, shifts, and returns to places again and again, aligning himself with the slow pace of the landscape rather than the urgency of media news. I often return to a moment Kudelka describes from his years of wandering, long before the wall project, when travel was not a subject or an assignment, but simply how he lived. He is sleeping outdoors, he has finished an orange someone gave him early that day. Lying under the stars he watches planes crossing the sky above him. Inside them he imagines people eating, drinking wine, settling into comfort. He imagines them wondering where they will sleep when they land. And then silently he answers them. I have none of the belongings and comforts that you have on the plane, he says, but I have everything that you don't have freedom. This is not romantic freedom, it is chosen constraint, a deliberate narrowing of life until attention sharpens. And I think this helps explain how Kudelka approaches the wall. To spend time with these photographs is to notice how difficult it becomes to remain neutral. Not because a position is declared, but because the wall itself makes indifference difficult. It reorganizes space too thoroughly and presses too firmly on movement, on distance, and on the way bodies and paths relate to one another. In many of the pictures the wall is interrupted. There are openings, gaps, places where something passes through. Josef Kudelka often frames these moments with care. They sit inside the photograph like smaller pictures in their own right. Views held within a larger view, the wall begins to behave like a frame. And frames, in photography, always carry weight. They choose. If you stay with these photographs long enough, the wall starts to feel less like an object than a condition. Something that quietly reshapes the land around it. Roads curve away, paths end without ceremony, and houses appear suspended, as if waiting for logic that no longer arrives. Nothing dramatizes refusal, and the land adjusts. That adjustment unsettles, because it suggests time, duration, the sense that this structure is built as if it will be here long enough for life to reorganize itself around it. Earlier in the series, we encountered a wall as a surface, something marked, scratched, inscribed over years of passing and return. Here the wall operates differently, but it is still bound to time, still shaped by repetition, and still asking what happens when living unfolds alongside something that does not move. So with Kudelka, without declaring intention, without claiming neutrality, we stay with the wall long enough to feel what it does, to space, to movement, to the rhythms of everyday life that must find their way around it. This is Photography and Walking. If you'd like to spend more time with this episode, you can find images, references, and links to the work discussed, including the film and the book, on the Photography and Walking website at photographyandwalking.com. See you next time.