Koudelka

Koudelka (クーデルカ) is a role-playing game developed by Sacnoth for the Sony PlayStation. The game was released on November 30, 1999 in North America, on December 16, 1999 in Japan, and on September 29, 2000 in Europe.

Gameplay

The style of the game is a combination of survival horror games and tactical RPGs with a grid-based system for combat.

Plot

Set in 1898 in Aberystwyth, Wales, the game follows the mysterious occurrences surrounding Nemeton Monastery and the three protagonists who, by chance, are forced to investigate its dark history. The plot is split up into several storylines that all interwine with each other: the history of the monastery itself as a prison for heretics and political adversaries, where the inmates were ruthlessly tortured and killed; the tragic fate of Charlotte, who was locked up in the monastery from birth and was executed at a young age, never knowing why, who believed she was never loved and now haunts the mansion; and Ogden's past as the captain of the sunken ship The Princess Alice, his friendship with the kind Elaine and the events occurring after Elaine's death.

Josef Koudelka

Josef Koudelka (born January 10, 1938) is a Czech photographer.

Biography

Koudelka was born in 1938 in Boskovice, Moravia. He began photographing his family and the surroundings with a 6 x 6 Bakelite camera. He studied at the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) between 1956 and 1961, receiving a Degree in Engineering in 1961. He staged his first photographic exhibition the same year. Later he worked as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and Bratislava.

He began taking commissions from theatre magazines, and regularly photographed stage productions at Prague's Theatre Behind the Gate on a Rolleiflex camera. In 1967, Koudelka decided to give up his career in engineering for full-time work as a photographer.

He had returned from a project photographing gypsies in Romania just two days before the Soviet invasion, in August 1968. He witnessed and recorded the military forces of the Warsaw Pact as they invaded Prague and crushed the Czech reforms. Koudelka's negatives were smuggled out of Prague into the hands of the Magnum agency, and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine under the initials P. P. (Prague Photographer) for fear of reprisal to him and his family.

This Place

This Place is a global art project that explores the complexity of Israel and the West Bank through the eyes of twelve internationally acclaimed photographers. The participating artists are Frederic Brenner, Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington. Each photographer created highly individualized works in response to his or her own experience in the area; the result is over 500 images which will be exhibited internationally and published in a series of monographs.

History

Initiated by Frederic Brenner, the project follows in the tradition of historic endeavors such as the Missions Héliographiques in nineteenth-century France and the Farm Security Administration in the United States, which gathered artists who use photography to ask essential questions about culture, society and the inner lives of individuals. Each artist spent approximately six months in residence, traveling throughout Israel and the West Bank, following his or her own line of investigation. Brenner offered the photographers initial exploratory visits, so they could decide if, and how, that wanted to be involved with the project. According to TIME: "This Place is not an act of photojournalism, nor does it contain — or send – a clear, unified message."