Josef Koudelka was born in Moravia in 1938 and began photographing his friends and family in about 1952. He began the work for which he is well known, his photographs of gypsies in the former Czechoslovakia, in the 1960s. From 1961 he worked as an aeronautical engineer, only becoming a full-time photographer in 1967. In the following year he photographed the invasion of Prague and was anonymously awarded the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Gold Medal for these photographs in 1969. Since then his work has been widely exhibited in New York, London and Paris. He became a citizen of France in 1987.