Prague  - Iconic images of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of then Czechoslovakia by acclaimed photographer Josef Koudelka, which give powerful testimony to despair, solidarity and resistance in the face of Soviet tanks, opened in Prague Saturday.

The author, whose identity had been long concealed, captured shock, misery and the futile struggle for freedom as well as irony and unity on Prague streets in the days after the Warsaw Pact troops seized the country.

Many of the photographs on display - Koudelka took thousands of snaps - were published for the first time.

Koudelka, then a 30-year-old, had just returned from Romania where he was photographing the Roma.

He had never shot a news event until the Soviet Union decided to crush the so-called Prague Spring, a short-lived blossoming of civil freedoms and democratic reform, with military force.

"Suddenly there was a situation which helped me to discover something in myself I had not been aware of," 70-year-old Koudelka said.

The photographs were smuggled out of the country, finding their way to the Magnum Photos agency, which distributed them before the invasion's first anniversary in 1969.

Magnum credited the pictures to PP, an unknown Prague photographer, to protect Koudelka and his family from communist regime retaliation.

The prize-winning photographer, who left Czechoslovakia in 1970, admitted publicly to taking the photos 16 years after the event, in 1984.

The show ends September 13. The photographs are also on display in Milan and the exhibition will open in New York on September 4. (dpa)