| Jitka Hanzlová | |
| Birth Place: | Náchod, Czechoslovakia |
Jitka Hanzlová (born 1958) is a Czech photographer, mostly known for her portraiture.[1]
Hanzlová grew up in Rokytník, a village in eastern Bohemia. From 1978 she worked for state television in Prague. In 1982, Hanzlová fled Prague and applied for political asylum in the Federal Republic of Germany. She was initially interested in painting and drawing before discovering photography as an artistic medium in 1983. Inspired by the works of Diane Arbus[2] and the anonymous portraits of Walker Evans, she undertook her first trip to America in 1986.
In 1987 she began studying visual communication at the University of Essen with a focus on photography, which she completed in 1994. In 1989, Stern published her first group of works under the title "Man Calls It School" about a school for asylum seekers.[3] After the fall of the Wall and the end of the communist regime, she traveled back to her Czech homeland for the first time.
Hanzlová received further formative impulses from the perspectives of the US photographer Robert Frank and the protagonists of New Color Photography Joel Sternfeld and William Eggleston. At the beginning of the 1990s she found important mentors in Ute Eskildsen, head of the photographic collection at the Museum Folkwang, Essen,[4] [5] and the writer John Berger, who accompanied the creation of her works Forest (2000–2005) and Horse (2007–2016).
From 2005 to 2007 she was a visiting professor at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, and from 2012 to 2016 at the Zurich University of the Arts.
Numerous international solo exhibitions accompany her artistic development. Since the beginnings her work has also been featured in countless group exhibitions and monographic surveys on the contemporary portrait, identity and the relation between men and nature (see bibliography). In 2019, the National Gallery Prague realized the large-scale solo exhibition Silences, curated by Adam Budak, which made the conceptual lines within her work visible for the first time.
Since 1990, Hanzlová has been working on groups of works in which she reflects on natural and urban living spaces.[6]
With Rokytník, developed as a student in Essen between 1990 and 1994, she laid the basis for her other series. Under the influence of the political and social upheaval after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the series is a photographic forensic investigation in which she portrays the village, its residents within the rural landscape of her childhood.[7] Photographed outside for the most part, the green of the meadows lend the dominant color. From the beginning her style is formally established: exclusively in upright (portrait) format, taken at eye level, with natural bright colours, rather bleak depictions of things and surroundings, quiet still lifes alternate with portraits, the subjects for the most part taking just half of the height of the picture frame, in Rokytník decidedly less yet, leaving space around them filled with atmosphere, underlining a belonging without sentimentality.[8] The feeling of a place and above all the light is very important to her.[4] The peaceful, almost relaxed ambience could not have been conveyed in black and white.[9] Not a typology of any kind like that August Sander was after, nor the profound sense of the typical American reality the colour photographs of William Eggleston emanate, in Hanzlová's portraits the colours appear to belong to the individual's identity as means of self-expression.[10]
In Bewohner, photographed between 1994 and 1996 for the most part in the Ruhr region in and around Essen, her hometown for over a decade then, the pictures of the "inhabitants" ("Bewohner" in German) and their environment get in contrast to one another; the same applies to a later group of work called Hier ("Here", 2005–2010). Rokytník was informed by portraits embedded in the landscape, animals appeared as part of rural life, a woman taking joyously a goat as a dance partner, equally tall like her on its hind legs, and a shot roe deer in the hands of a hunter. Now animals tend to be portrayed, too, and even a leafless and half-faded sun flower in a plastic pot might be seen as such.[10] The portrait as genre commonly defined by isolating an individual or group from its surroundings (usually in a studio setting) gains significance, without neglecting the actual space and the natural light of the setting. Nevertheless, the unsmiling gaze of the portrayed women and a boy are self-assured and appear not anonymous at all.[11] A roughly equal amount of photographs of almost abstract details of architecture, an oil patch or a picture of a plane on an foggy airfield and some landscapes translate as well into uprooting and anchorlessness. A quote from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities on the alienation of city dwellers in stratified times in space is put in front of the sequence of photographs of Bewohner, which opens with a bird's eye panorama of snowy Berlin, a one-off view in her work and deeply symbolic for the history of Europe in the 20th century as well as every individual like herself whose life is determined by it, disrupted and connected again in a precarious way.[10]
The large series of Female (1997–2000) and the subsequent Brixton, a district in South London with a large community of Caribbean immigrants, where she was invited by The Photographers' Gallery in 2002, consist both exclusively of portraits of women. They were most often alien to her, women she met on the street. But she gets closer; in Brixton, a small group of 23 photographs, all portraits are photographed as three-quarter figures, leaving space of about a quarter of the height and half of the picture's width. And in both series the women look all straight into the camera. In Brixton windows appear several times and work as a metaphor for the "between", a term Hanzlová uses to describe the different connections between the interior and exterior, the individual's situation in its living space and the historic dimension of belonging, loss and alienation.[12] Crucial for these layers to translate into the picture and become visible is the connection "between" the subject and the camera in the moment of the shot: "on occasions it becomes dense while on others it miraculously transforms itself into a road of there and back again, a cord that connects the two spaces."[13]
Nature does not appear in her long-term projects Forest (2000-2005), Vanitas (2009-2012), Horse (2007-2014) and Water (2013-2020), only as a physical image space, but also as a “psychic energy field”, charged with the potential to make metaphysical themes visible. Her photography, says the author Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, “is not only un-ideological but downright anti-ideological.”[14]
First number indicates the number of reproductions printed in the book, not actual photographs.
Hanzlová's work is held in the following permanent collections:[25]