As the first survey exhibition in Switzerland since 1977 dedicated exclusively to the work of Josef Koudelka, the exhibition and the accompanying book offer new insights into his career. In particular, part of his personal archive has been researched and presented, namely the 30,000 35mm contact sheets from 1960 to 2012. Ikonar is the nickname Josef Koudelka received from a group of Roma he met on his travels. They called him an "icon maker" because they used his famous photographs of Roma communities as quasi-religious icons in their place of worship. Although an internationally recognized "image maker," Koudelka considers himself more a "collector of his own images" than a photographer.Aiming to capture the essence of the artist's worldview, this exhibition draws on key works from his most important 35mm film series, including Theatre, Gypsies, Invasion 68, and Exiles. However, the exhibition includes not only an installation entirely dedicated to his archives, which aims to analyze their place in the personal and artistic trajectory of one of the great actors of 20th-century photography, but also a reference library with a wide selection of his books. The exhibition is conceived as a selective and condensed retrospective, thus tracing the photographer's development and working methods. Thus, the exhibition also addresses some of the central paradoxes of Koudelka's work, life, and career: a nomadic life versus a relentless focus on collecting and archiving; a constant selection and reworking of his iconic works versus a "maximalist" philosophical agenda striving for perfection; and, in the second half of his career, a self-proclaimed obsession with continuing to exhibit and record images, sometimes to the detriment of their analysis and material realization as works.