Jitka Hanzlová

Choosing Photography as a New Language After Exile

Hanzlová left Czechoslovakia in 1982 and became a political exile in West Germany. The ALBERTINA notes that she discovered photography while rebuilding her life from the beginning^*1. Immediately after her move, speaking German was difficult, and seeing, listening, and observing became central to daily life. In conversation with Urs Stahel, Hanzlová recalled that vision became her “first language” again and that she began studying photography around 1983^*10. An essay by Isabel Tejeda likewise connects the loss of her mother tongue with the discovery of photography as a form that did not depend on translation^*21.

The camera became a way to wait before another person, receive their gaze, and connect memory to a present place. Even when language was not fully shared, photographer and subject could share the time of the encounter and the frame of a photograph. The National Gallery Prague places a photographic language formed between two cultural and political systems at the center of its retrospective^*2. The National Galleries of Scotland similarly identifies exile and resettlement in Essen as the background to Hanzlová’s sustained inquiry into place and identity^*4.

Photographic Education in Essen and Returning Home After the Cold War

From 1987 to 1994, Hanzlová studied visual communication in Essen. The Folkwang tradition, shaped by Otto Steinert, had made the city one of Germany’s principal sites for photographic education, with strong histories in both art photography and documentary^*22. Within that environment, she developed a distance between social typology and a photography governed entirely by the maker’s emotion. After the political changes of 1989, she returned to her home village of Rokytník while still a student and began her first major series in 1990^*1. Socialist patterns of life remained as market economics and democratization entered the village. Hanzlová photographed residents, clothing, animals, laundry, roads, and fields through the seasons. Long-term work and serial form allowed political transition to register at the speed with which it appeared on the surface of everyday life.

Rokytník—Seeing Person and Place Together in the Vertical Frame

Rokytník (1990–94) photographs villagers, houses, roads, livestock, and plants in an almost consistently vertical format. The ALBERTINA notes her use of vertical framing even for landscape and her restrained color description of a village still marked by socialism and approaching change^*1. A horizontal view can gather a village into a single panorama. Hanzlová’s vertical frames place one body, tree, or house at the center while retaining ground, wall, field, and sky around it.

Home is therefore dispersed among individual people and places instead of being condensed into one emblematic landscape. Small prints encourage the viewer to approach and read expression and surroundings together. It would be too direct to explain these formal choices as simple results of exile. Their clear effect, however, is to preserve the distance between a returning photographer and the village. A Fotomuseum Winterthur collection text confirms in a single work how portrait and landscape speak about belonging at the same time^*5.

Waiting as a Form of Contact Beyond Language

After migration, Hanzlová depended on looking, listening, and observing in an environment whose speech she could not yet fully understand. She recalled in conversation with Urs Stahel that images allowed her to communicate with others and with herself^*10. Photography receives the time of an encounter. She stands before a person with the camera, gains consent, and waits for them to look back. Caution, curiosity, and hesitation enter posture and gaze. By retaining clothing, walls, fields, and light around the face, the photograph situates those responses within place and social circumstance.

Bewohner—From the Open Village to the Walled and Fenced City

Bewohner (1994–96), made in cities including Berlin and Essen, was conceived as a direct counterpart to Rokytník. The ALBERTINA describes fences, geometric walls, damaged buildings, and lower-middle-class objects enclosing the figures in place of the village’s open horizon^*1. Person and environment remain one photographic situation. Urban surfaces, boundaries, and empty areas become conditions that shape posture and isolation.

Female—Avoiding Types and Negotiating the Street Portrait

Female (1997–2000) was made by approaching women encountered while walking in New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, and other cities. The ALBERTINA presents the series as one in which the act of photographing becomes communication^*1. Urs Stahel emphasizes that the work avoids defining an essence of femininity or producing a statistical type, remaining instead with singular encounters^*10. Each woman looks back at the camera, recording a brief agreement and tension rather than a one-sided act of observation.

Forest—Photographing the Forest as Subjective Experience

Forest (2000–05) grew from repeated visits to the Czech woods Hanzlová knew as a child. She photographed trees, ground, fog, spiders, and light. John Berger argued that the photographs leave behind the touristic image of nature viewed from outside and create the experience of a body inside the forest, feeling the spaces among branches, undergrowth, and openings^*17. The vertical frame aligns the rise of trees with the photographer’s body and offers no clear entrance or overlook. The forest becomes a place where moving into the past and trying to see the future occur together.

Hier—Nature and Urban Wounds in the Ruhr Industrial Region

Hier was photographed over an extended period in Essen and the Ruhr region. People, animals, damaged buildings, and traces of pollution form one sequence. The ALBERTINA describes a landscape deformed by mining, war, and infrastructure, alongside signs of plant life returning^*1. Yancey Richardson publishes the actual arrangement of cows, playground equipment, trees, industrial landscapes, and people in the same small vertical format^*6. The title, “Here,” does not announce a stable new homeland. It gathers multiple histories within a place of residence and the time through which nature exceeds human use.

There Is Something I Don’t Know—Renaissance Portrait Conventions and Contemporary Faces

For There Is Something I Don’t Know, Hanzlová sought people whose faces recalled fifteenth- and sixteenth-century portraiture and photographed them in contemporary dress against spare backgrounds. Yancey Richardson describes the overlap of historical poses and present bodies as producing portraits difficult to assign to one period^*3. The ALBERTINA notes how posture, background, and furniture cite older conventions while preserving the concentrated interaction between photographer and sitter^*1. Yancey Richardson’s exhibition archive presents the series in a form that allows the works to be compared^*13. Resemblance is not fixed as historical repetition; the work asks how portrait conventions guide the reading of a person.

Horse and Water—Beyond Human-Centered Portraiture

Horse (2007–14) moves close to mouths, ears, manes, and eyes, approaching the long relation between humans and horses through contact with individual animals. Yancey Richardson explains how the proximity of details conveys physical force and emotional connection^*3. Water (2013–19) addresses clouds, ice, melting, and reflection. The ALBERTINA identifies it as a series in which ecological concerns become increasingly prominent^*1. Yancey Richardson’s Water That Dreams presents images and an exhibition arranged in six chapters across liquid, gaseous, and solid states^*14. The attention previously directed toward people extends to animals and natural processes.

Photobook Sequence—Dispersing Home Across People, Roads, Animals, and Gaps

Rokytník, Bewohner, Female, Forest, and Hier were shaped as photobooks, where the order of faces, roads, walls, animals, and plants produces a sense of place. Kehrer Verlag’s retrospective catalogue brings together the major series in 139 color plates and identifies an image language where objectivity and empathy, planning and chance, coexist^*16. A single iconic picture would tend to concentrate home in one person or landscape. In a book, an empty road can follow a portrait; a wall or field can follow an animal; blank pages determine intervals between images. Belonging is experienced as reading time moving among environmental fragments. Steidl’s artist page organizes the major publications by series and demonstrates the consistency with which the work has appeared in book form^*11. The series and the photobook prevent return from closing as a single act of recovery.

Exile and the Distance of Vertical Format, Color, and Print

Vertical framing, muted color, small prints, natural light, and book sequence each have photographic and editorial functions. Explaining all of them through exile alone would reduce the formal work to biography. Across the major series, however, a recurring distance allows Hanzlová to approach people and places without claiming possession. Fundación MAPFRE’s large retrospective crossed village, city, forest, Japan, flowers, horses, and portraiture, showing the connection among distinct series through a common visual language^*7.

Restrained color preserves distinctions among clothing, walls, and vegetation without turning nostalgia into a strong color effect. Small prints require closeness, yet they do not bring the viewer near enough to speak fully for the person or place. It is more accurate to say that exile resonates with the time spent waiting before a subject, the angle that retains the environment, and the viewing distance of the print than to claim that these devices directly represent exile.

European Photography in the 1990s—Exile, Cities, and Political Transition

Hanzlová’s early work was received within exhibitions concerned with exile and the transformation of East and West Europe. Artlist records Czechoslovak Exile Photography in 1988, the Folkwang Museum’s Im Fremden Land in 1992, the European Photography Award in 1995, and Manifesta 1 in 1996^*8. Rokytník and Bewohner do not present the home village and the West German city as separate cultural portraits. Through the position of figures, clothing, walls, roads, and light, they register the pace at which political systems enter everyday life. Their contemporaneity belongs to the vertical frame that keeps person and environment together as much as to the subject of borders. The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation identifies this refusal to separate a figure from the light and environment of a place as a shared feature of the principal series^*9. Raffaella Cortese’s artist material likewise presents people, cities, animals, and natural phenomena through the same vertical color method^*18.

Awards and Retrospectives: Recognition of the Work as Series

After receiving the European Photography Award in 1995, Hanzlová was shortlisted for the Citibank Photography Prize and won the BMW–Paris Photo Prize in 2007^*3. Between Continuum at the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig presented the major series since 1990 and showed return as an ongoing measure of distance from the present, renewed with each period of photographing^*20. Later exhibitions at Fundación MAPFRE, the National Gallery Prague, the Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, and the ALBERTINA shifted from selecting a few images as illustrations of exile toward presenting Rokytník, Bewohner, Female, Forest, Hier, Horse, and Water as connected series^*1. The work could then be considered through color, vertical format, book sequence, and the proportion of figure to background, instead of primarily as a biographical symbol. Mai 36 Galerie describes the retrospective as crossing two social systems in East and West^*12, while Yancey Richardson records the ALBERTINA presentation as her first museum solo exhibition in Austria^*15.

Using the Same Vertical Format While Preserving Differences Among Village, City, and Forest

In Rokytník, fields and animals remain around villagers’ bodies; in Bewohner, walls, fences, and roads press close behind them. In Forest, a tree or a dark cluster of leaves occupies the same vertical form as a human portrait. Georg Kargl’s exhibition material presents five years of work in the forest alongside Hanzlová’s statement that returning to the past could become a way to look toward the future^*19.

Repeating the same format across village, city, and forest keeps each place from being isolated as exotic scenery or as a symbol of biography. The height of a figure, the distance to a background, and the amount of light can be compared across series without erasing environmental differences. Vertical framing and serial form hold the Czech village, the West German city, and the forest of childhood apart within a common set of photographic conditions.