First (the artist)

Following her flight from Czechoslovakia to the West, Jitka Hanzlová underwent a transformation that took her years, without it being evident to her what sort of future it promised. She knew she wanted to shake herself loose of the ‘inculcated fears’ – daily life in a socialist regime – but also to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater, that is to say, avoid giving up the good, the given that she carried within. Just as much, she wanted gradually to build herself a new life, a space within which she could assert herself in the world, and develop ideas that were practicable and visible to others.

During our conversations, Jitka showed me two notes she had written down a long time ago:

“Sometime in early 1983, I received a little book sized 9 × 7 cm, filled with words. I only knew half of them. It was a Langenscheidt dictionary, Czech/German, German/Czech. I took it everywhere with me and began looking up words in it, even while I learned at home each day, and tried to fish words out of that sea of letters – and to translate them. It was a long way to go to proper German grammar. But eventually, the tiny, plastic-bound book was so tattered and worn, its spine split open, the soft book covers gone off, that it fell apart.

Afterwards, it only lay on a shelf, because much of its contents had been tidily ordered in my head. I did not need it anymore. It became a relic of those early times.

Meanwhile, I began studying photography and also learned bookbinding. It was the first book I bound by myself, in sand-coloured linen, with a yellow ribbon, bare. Some years later, I was taking photographs in Rokytník and retrieving my past, piece by piece, sought my own photographic language and, at last, – truth.

But what is truth? Sometimes I saw it, there, outside in the woods, in the trees, pastures and slopes, or so I thought. On one long winter evening, I glued a cut-out contact print of a lonely pear tree onto the front cover of this book. And underneath, I wrote:

The truth is in the forest. I believed it.

And the book was finally complete.”1

“I came to photography both accidentally and consistently; at a time when, as a stranger, I could not converse or understand, and was for a long time reliant on looking, listening and observing, indeed almost existentially condemned to it. During this time, looking became my first language once again. I put my memories on hold and lived as though I only stood on one leg, I began to sign and communicate through these images, by post with others or in dialogue with myself. That is when I began the quest for my THING, my vocation. After a year, photography came to me overnight, without a camera, without having ever made a picture: I left my job and set off on a search... how so? I knew it was my Thing. But, until now, I had no idea I landed in a stronghold of photography where the word ‘Folkwang’ means so much.” 2

Next

Some years later, Jitka Hanzlová was taking photographs in Rokytník and retrieving her past, piece by piece. Her personal return to a disappearing time. A time she hoped to have left behind, one she had forced herself out of. Indeed, socialist thinking, the state apparatus, those odd straits, a delegation of responsibility onto the system. And on the other hand, compulsive, excess energy, yearning, life itself. In the early 1980s, she landed in Germany and took a good while to come back. She was forbidden, barred from returning on threat of punishment. After the turning events in 1989, shuttling from West to East and back again. Living and studying in Essen, home still in Rokytník? Living in Essen, yearning for Rokytník, at home on the way, alone? Or living and acting in Essen, at home somewhere in between? These are open questions that demand investigation, memories that need to be refreshed, ordered, understood and preserved. Thoroughly, at the risk of being surprised, affronted or beset with them once again. For years. ‘Resi-detention’ in Essen – one is tempted to write, looking from the outside.

The dictionary initiated her search for a language in a new world, her quest, her wish to become grounded, to build herself a new form of life. “It was the first book I bound by myself, in sand-coloured linen, with a yellow ribbon, bare.” Afterward, Jitka Hanzlová would bind virtually all of her books in linen, always single-coloured, in different shades of the spectrum. The only exceptions are Female, with a photograph, lettering and the publisher’s name on the cover, as well as Vielsalm and Bewohner, where she opted for a paper-covered case binding. The linen or paperboard always carries an embossed title: Rokytník. Female. Bewohner. Forest. Hier. Horse. Vanitas, and Cotton Rose, the name of a plant. The names or designations of the images are always stamped in the linen, sometimes overlaid  with glossy foil, but the typography and size of their letters is so delicate and subtle yet equally bright and luminous as to suggest these signs were chosen with great deliberation. Home. Nature.  New Neighbours. Nature 2. An oppressive here and now, transience.

Fields of limitation, of purpose, of existence. Indeed, also fields of truth. Like first and last words. Like a personal alphabet. Bare. These are the vertical-format visual notebooks of a seeker of truth. Language is important for Jitka Hanzlová. Even in the mute state of exile, of being a stranger in a new world, which honed her ability and sense to see, to explore the world in images, simple and precise, that, as she herself wrote, led her to photography. To photography and to Folkwang, a then-famous photography school, later united with the Universitäts-Gesamthochschule Essen and known today as the Folkwang University of the Arts.

Rokytník

Indeed, bare, exposed. Like the children in Rokytník, who crawl forward on an asphalt road still wet from a summer shower, playfully searching, exploring, savouring and probing the residual damp with the palms of their hands. Testing if they want to remain crawlers or stand up and walk upright. Bare like the young girl that, both vulnerable and bold, has propped herself up against a rusty rail. ‘Here I am’, she seems to say wordlessly, herself uncertain what it entails now and what it will in the future. Bare, also like the slaughtered sheep roasted on an open fire, pried in half on an iron spit. In this poetic-melancholic tour of Hanzlová’s hometown of Rokytník, children and toddlers stand for the future. They stand  for the laughter, the looking, the wonder, the play, the exploration, even the obstinacy, the assertion, self-assertion in the world – though it is unclear for how long. They are the rebirth in this village portrait, the renewal, whereas the adults, the elders, the old ones, for all their serenity, seem bolted down to their roles like poles in a wooden fence. They follow the way they have set themselves or that they have been prescribed, they follow duty. Only rarely is their chest genuinely free, only seldom do they breathe deeply and with ease. Their gaze is fixed, often downcast and clouded, it seems to anticipate where it will be allowed to wander in the years to come. Little moments of pride, repose, intimations of a covert sense of humour, but other than that – only duty, that is the course of life, that is how time passes. Nevertheless, despite a malnourished outlook on life that has thinned out with time, we sense a great deal of oneness with fate, a lot of insight into necessity – of the situation, of the possibilities (and lack thereof).

This cross section of the village of her childhood is stretched out, the synchronic tied down and drawn out along the diachronic, the axis of time, until it extends into a spatial-temporal network revolving around the cycles of life. A field framed by two images of the landscape: at the outset, orange and red laundry fluttering over a lush green summer meadow, brightened up by the radiant sun, at the end, laundry again, but this time in torpor, brittle, hung outside in the deep, fresh snow. A quiet and intense portrait simultaneously, one that follows the seasons, strictly dividing the inner from the outer, one that, with certain exceptions, hardly resorts to images of interiors, and instead shows the outdoors in all its – as children see it – breadth and openness. A portrait of a village that does not name its characters individually but rather unites them in a social and existential village panorama, built around carefully selected sequences of images, portraits, pictures of the landscape, of two rare interiors, with blank pages interspersed in between. A village portrait overlaid and entwined with a self-portrait of the photographer herself.

This book justified the growing attention that Jitka Hanzlová’s work garnered internationally. It was her first photographic work made in colour, so important in her photography – these often lightly undersaturated colours that endow the art and the world portrayed in her art with a touch of clarity and lightness. The only exception here would be an image of a slaughtered pig against an interior radiating an almost symbolic glow. The images in Rokytník very clearly defined the own, peculiar photographic space that Jitka Hanzlová stakes out and occupies regularly and almost in a state of sleepwalking: she photographs directly, almost penny-plain, stands beside the people or in front of them, without there being anything confrontational about her camera. She is there, accompanies the situation, almost acting like an intimate friend, like a travel companion to her ‘subjects’. She is there, in the open, and at the same time leaves room for occurrence. 

Forest

While in Rokytník, Jitka Hanzlová returns to the village of her birth and compiles a sort of poetic sociogram of the people and their community in a run-out communist system, including some of her own family members – her father, her mother – in Forest, she comes into the ‘depths’ of nature. Into the origin of her nature, the systemless refuge of her childhood. Into the dual forest by the village, by Rokytník, into nature outside the social system, into Being outside ideology. Into the empty forest filled with life, empty of people, almost empty of visible animals – they hide, that is – but full of life, scents, full of dangling beings, trees, bushes, rustling leaves.

Interrupted by silence, when the gigantic, deadening forest seems to absorb and swallow everything with the density of its trees and bushes, for instants, for short moments of time, before life breaks through again into the depths of the woods. She comes here, into the forest, the universal, the origin of life, the refuge of life, to the point departure and return, into a form of original being. As if narrowly bypassing her social provenance, in this project, Jitka Hanzlová leaves Rokytník behind, immerses herself in the closest possible proximity to ‘nature’ and emerges from it again. As in Rokytník and her later major projects, she slowly gropes around the chosen location and the theme she discovers. Takes a picture, gives it a try, shakes her head, throws it away, starts again, always over again, goes deeper, even deeper. Over months and years. Often it takes five or even more years until she finds and executes the visual language for what she wants to say, show and communicate, until she is able to assemble a series of images that express this need, this search, this yearning and this urgency. The intensity of the search seems to stand on existential necessity. In her images, the Forest coagulates into

a central place, a sort of secular Origin, a materialised unconscious of Being itself. It is as if we found ourselves in the eye of a storm, at the heart of a hurricane, often peaceful, silent, decelerating, seemingly empty of people, empty of animals, large and small alike – the only two that we see are a bird and a spider. The forest becomes the womb in which the world is recreated and reborn. Perpetually and endlessly. At least, as John Berger wrote in an essay on this book, in a manner far from linear, structured, productive time, time as progress, which is how we have known it since the industrialisation of life two centuries ago.3 Timeless or ‘timely’, in total silence, in still air. Covered and peaceful in winter. Glowing, in a view of a brightly- lit clearing seen through the leaves. Barely any direction, barely any movement, as though in this book we were circling an invisible centre.

I read these images largely as a descent into the deep unconscious of Nature, into ‘primordial sound’ – insofar as it exists – to the place from which life on Earth draws its vigour. Turning the pages of the book, we doze off into a drowse, rub our eyes, follow the tracks in half-darkness, only half-legible, half-comprehensible signs, the scrubby grass, anxious that the glimmering light on a clearing, the wondrous brightness of a forest covered in snow, will sink into darkness again, into total darkness. Emanuele Coccia, the Italian philosopher of nature, talks about how plants embody the “most radical form of Being-in-the-World”, how they are open, patient, steadfast, boundless, how they act without acting.4 In The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, he observes: “Thanks to plants, the Earth definitively became the metaphysical space of breath.”5 He understands the leafy treetop soaring in the sky as the centre  of the trunk and root. In his view, plants are “a mechanism that tie the Earth to the sky.” And he closes with the statement: “All bodies, even those of humans, are ultimately transformations of light.”6

The forest and its needles and leaves are seen as a great powerhouse, an energy transformer, that breathes light and life force into the world, that animates, ‘inspires’ the dark. Coccia constantly discusses this radical, permanent interplay that we feel in the woodland images of Jitka Hanzlová. “For staying is nowhere,” the artist quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, playing on the inconstancy of life, and perhaps also on the search for “Being here is glorious,” for “Veins filled with being.”7

In any event, it is at least about her search for her truth, and perhaps also for the truth of us all. And conversely: in Forest, these often obscure, engrossing, in some cases abstract and murmuring images, we as the observers perceive Jitka Hanzlová’s passionate, deep search for the nub, the quintessence of life, for things that endure.

Horse

Ten years after Forest comes Horse. The title on the book is colourless and stamped in larger letters than earlier, on golden yellow linen, the spaces between the characters spread out, as though the individual letters – H-O-R-S-E – somehow traced the contours of a mystery: the mystery of the horse. A highly unusual project in the largest book format so far. Why would a serious  artist take on the theme of ‘horse’, I was once tempted to ask. The dream of many a young girl, the selling point of nearly every photo calendar. And then, I looked in the eyes of the first horse, at the teeth of the second, at the pricked up ears of the next, at the tail, at their different stances. I observed it while it urinates, while it listens, plays, while it throws itself around in the sand, perhaps to scratch its back, while it stands plainly there, simply yet notably, no more and no less. I looked through this extraordinary book of images of and with horses, of views of horses, of horses’ views of us.

In a way characteristic of her, here too, Jitka Hanzlová occupied herself for years, in this case eight years, with horses – with images of horses, slowly but gradually distancing herself from conventional horse portraits and allowing both herself and us observers to come closer to images of a different nature, to the being and behaviour of horses as such. She shows us horses in such naturalness that at times we forget they are not wild, but that we are rather experiencing extraordinary, intimate moments of equine being in a human setting. Jitka Hanzlová is practically a horse whisperer. Her approach to these creatures is unusual, direct, close. The interaction seems almost playful. She quickly earns the trust of these animals. The way she conducts herself in front of and with horses, the slowness of her touch, her speech, appears to soothe the horse easily and heighten  his willingness to turn to her, a human being, calmly yet attentively.

We perceive this closeness in her images, as well as a degree of self-evidence, a respect for the animal as a being equal to oneself. Not merely as a creature intended for man, a pet, readily available, a workhorse, a race horse, or a source of nourishment, horse meat. On many of these photographs, the horse appears alone, for itself, occupied with itself, undirected at a human being, and simultaneously does not seem abstracted as zoo animals do.

Almost forty years ago, British art and cultural critic John Berger published a short philosophy of animals under the title Why Look at Animals? 8 and asked why it is that we look at animals, whether we really look at them and, if so, what for. He observed: “Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise, they were mortal and immortal. An animal’s blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion and each ox was Ox. This – maybe the first existential dualism – was reflected in the treatment of animals. They were subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed.”9 Throughout the history of humankind, animals progressively lost this status of an other, Descartes’s separation of body and soul reduced them to soulless beings, turned them into machines subservient to man. The zoo of old is equally symbol and example of this as the animal factory. All over the world, animals slowly but surely faded from man’s view as equals in nature. They were paid less and less attention and eventually only harnessed for practical purposes. In zoos, they have become living monuments to their own disappearance, Berger wrote. Nowadays, they are physical food and visual food, in the form of millions of cat and horse images on the internet: “Therein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalization. That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished.”10

With this development, the animal has come to be regarded only as susceptible to observation – the act of the animal’s observing man had lost all its meaning (with perhaps one single exception: our pets). That is precisely what Horse reverses, or at the very least complements. Certainly, Jitka Hanzlová looks, but she is also looked at. That is visible, perceptible, even in those images where the horses appear to be most preoccupied with themselves. That is the extraordinary power of the aesthetic chosen in this book and project. We as observers are intimately close to the animals – often almost able to smell their scent, feeling like we could stroke their mane and reach in their mouth. And then Jitka Hanzlová takes a step back and observes the horse from afar, photographs it as it dances in front of her, perhaps for her, because of her. One to One, as one of her exhibitions at Yancey Richardson in New York in 2015 titled – referring to the immediate reflection of the human being, his moods, his energy, his anxiety through the horse.

Home – the village, people, parents –; the forest – a piece of untouched, virgin nature, original ground; – and the animal – in this case the horse: I read this as a trilogy in the work of Jitka Hanzlová. A trilogy she had to create, even if she was not initially aware of it. A trilogy, one might assume, that is closely tied with her way abroad, her detachment from ‘home’. Three deeply anchored pillars of her photographic, emotional and existential being. 

Bewohner & Hier

My reflections do not follow Jitka’s projects chronologically. After Rokytník, she published Bewohner, then Female, Vielsalm, Forest, Hier, Horse, Vanitas and finally Cotton Rose. Bewohner and Hier can be read as counterparts to Rokytník, Forest  and Horse, as countertypes, in a certain sense as images from an altogether different world. They do not create an impression that is abundant and satiated,  like the projects described above, instead they are barren, closed, rigid, geometric like an urban, practical structure, they do not seem genuinely colourful but often grey, they are not luscious but anaemic. The cover on Bewohner is blue-green, the word itself is printed in small letters, as though the artist could not properly place trust in this word. The series of images begins with a misty view of Berlin by Alexanderplatz. Snow has fallen, lines of cars plough through the dense, white stuff. Hardly any light falls through the fog, the clouds on the scenery. This image sets the tone for the rest of the book.

Afterwards, some spilled gasoline on the road, the forbidding, nearly windowless facade of an office building with an unfortunate colour scheme, an odd coach bus, young trees recultivating stretches of  land spoiled by strip mining, a plane before take-off or after landing, again in this ghastly light, a sloping, slightly mossy tree trunk growing in front of a frugal house. In the middle of the book, an exception: a white inner wall with an inscribed decorative plate and a dummy gun, hung one above the other. The plate states drily, pragmatically: ‘Work is the best consolation.’ Finally, a ruffled, leafless sunflower growing in a pot on the table, straightened up like a piece of wood. In between are portraits where the effort of the photographer and  the subject go hand in hand to produce a decent, and where possible, unforced image. For contrast, a caged peacock fanning his tail and a penguin whose will to freedom shatters against the thick glass wall of the aquarium. The power relations here are clear.

In Hier, this mood is continued, compressed, thickened. The book is filled with geometric surfaces, a wall that cuts the view of a house right through the middle, overhead power lines running along an orderly football field. Front doors locked shut like the gates on a fortress, like blast-proof doors, a shrub growing through the floor and a ceiling, birch trunks blackened by the dirty air criss-crossing like the legs of a giraffe in front of a charred house wall. Tangles of leafless branches cover the images like patched cracks on a facade, grey on grey or reddish-brown to pitch black. The shutters are mostly pulled down.

It is striking how, in these images, all of which were taken in the wider area of Ruhr, the photographer plays with the geometrization of nature and natural habitats, with the theme of limits, constraint, grey and grim isolation, a form of habituated yet deeply-rooted doggedness. In Hier, the youngsters look as stern as adults. The role of the colourful peacock, the sad clown is played shily and bashfully by a young made-up girl dressed in a light blue tutu. A carnival is fine, even in May, in front of the blooming bushes. But only as an exception, for a few days, like before. Afterwards, again: work, zoo, grey zone. With a few exceptions that make the Hier possible, liveable, usable, that free the blood in our veins. The ‘inhospitality of our cities,’11 of our living environment, the places reflected in Hier, has intensified over decades and carved itself into the people’s very posture. Bombed from above during World War II and undermined from below by brown coal mining. Even the leaves are not beige, brown, yellow, reddish but shimmer with metal-grey, coal-grey. The copper colour of the title stamped in linen mirrors an image inside the book, depicting the locked front door on a house, made entirely of copper. It seems to announce: Careful, money here.

Female

After Hier, it is refreshing to open and slowly page through Female. The book, like several of those by Jitka Hanzlová, maintains a traditional format. The pages on the left are white and empty, those on the right carry portraits of women with some more white space below. One after another, from all over the world. The women always look directly into the camera, and the images are often framed as American shots, that is to say, they end slightly above knee level. I like the idea that this shot format was frequently used in westerns to keep both the cowboys and their guns in view, as it says on Wikipedia.12 The edge of the frame could not cut through the gun. A subtle irony of this sort of framing. The women mostly look the photographer and us observers directly in the eye. They often stand straight, in the middle of the street or on the pavement, in front of a wall, in a park, only rarely do they sit in a café and even then, they look upwards or at a tree and then back at ’us’. They always peer into the camera lens and thereby also in our eyes. The photographs narrate an encounter, of the portrayed women on the one hand and of the photographer on the other, who finds her reflection in the women’s gaze and demeanour.

Hours on hours, Jitka Hanzlová roamed over foreign cities, through all of Manhattan, through Los Angeles, Madrid, London, Essen, Düsseldorf, Berlin and Cologne and approached women in the middle of the street, asking if she could take a picture of them. It took her four years. The portraits represent an implicit assent to participate. Taken up closely – but not too close – from a comfortable, proper distance that allows us to observe directly without feeling intrusive. The women have decided to play along at short notice. Those that have refused remain unseen.

And those that have agreed present themselves with various degrees of readiness, with more or less energy. Some look directly ahead, assertively, others are guarded, cautious, hesitant, tentative or slightly disapproving and reticent. The former show themselves to the camera, freely present themselves and their self-image to the lens, the latter are simply there, photographed, at times even somewhat defencelessly.

They do not merely show themselves as they are but also, covertly, whence they are, what sort of milieu they come from, and how they are, how they want to be and appear, but also how they certainly do not want to appear. These layers are overlaid with the gaze of the photographer, who within the space of the encounter’s few minutes develops a feeling for the person, the woman, which plays an equally important role when the shutter releases as the wish to ‘simply’ picture the seen. A multi- layered event, a compact stratification, paired with certain expectations that all stack on top each other like the pages of a volume. What is perceptible throughout the book and in the range of behaviours is how much the subjects ultimately trusted the photographer and how they have thereby enmeshed themselves in the request, encounter and photographic game.

The work is about 20 years old, the book was published in 2000. What stands out, at least in my opinion, is how unguided by ideology the project appears. Jitka Hanzlová is not trying to prove, demonstrate anything at all, she is not looking to produce a typology, and definitely not some sort of essence of the Feminine, she seeks the concrete, real encounter with these women – women of various age – while she takes the photograph. The encounter is important in itself, always one on one, accompanied by the question of what it means to be Female, free of the context of ‘men’, at least in the instant when the photograph is taken. She wants to see and show individual human beings directly, so far as it is possible, and she allows them, within the limits of photography and the urban setting, the freedom to be who they want to be. A fleeting, temporally limited moment of convergence between two different beings in the moment of the shutter release. Despite an intense focus on individuality, on the individuality of the Female, over time, we begin to draw comparisons, for instance in the play of arms – crossed, hanging left and right, folded behind the back, propping the head – of different manners of looking, of the posture of the head and body. Female is the only work by Jitka Hanzlová with a clear-cut concept from beginning to end.

Vielsalm, Cotton Rose, Brixton and other works

There is a number of other important projects and books that I summarize somewhat briefly here: for example, the slim booklet Vielsalm that, when one understands it as a sort of natural theatre, ‘plays out’ in Vielsalm in the Bastogne arrondissement of the Belgian province of Luxembourg and narrates the photographer’s break with her commission and the orderly local park: with a pack of wild boars trotting past us in a row, a strangely undulated, seemingly alive, elongated grass glade, a net of roofs and treetops submerged in the morning fog.

Then there is a project published long after it was produced, Cotton Rose – People and Places, created during the photographer’s two trips to Japan, in which she – on the one hand, out of respect for the inhabitants and a foreign, unfamiliar culture, on the other, in order to tie them in with the surrounding nature and their environment – took most of the portraits from a larger distance than usual.

Or her series of photographs from Brixton, a district in South London, with its Afro-Caribbean community and its violent riots in the 1980s. Like in Female, here Jitka Hanzlová created an assemblage of impressive portraits of the dark-skinned women in this raw part of town, except here the portraits were often marked with caution, mistrust and tension, portraits that needed to be counterbalanced by views at and through windows, of flower bouquets and a sagging leather couch.

In her works from the recent years, her portraits and flower photographs, the artist in a certain sense leaves her former field,  she removes herself in part from reality by positioning the people and plants in front of a black background. Formally, these portraits hark back to earlier times, to paintings, Renaissance portraits, the flower photos remind of herbaria, the difference being that they are not set against a light background but against a filmic pitch black. She thereby sets her ‘motifs’ in a theatrical, artificial framework, and places emphasis on the themes of birth of identity in the portraits and on vanitas, transience in the flower photographs. Vanitas is also the title of a small but precious, marvellous book that thematises the ephemerality of beauty, and ultimately the profusion, the potlatch of life. A delicate, subtle yet photographically highly precise and remarkable blend of vanitas and Memento mori – coupled with a subtle undertone of Carpe diem – the ‘Seize the day’, ‘Enjoy life to the fullest’, ‘Make use of life’ (to put it pragmatically) – the well-known dictum from one of Horace’s Odes.

In her most recent works, which are still in progress, Jitka Hanzlová dives into water, an element she cherishes so centrally, in its various forms and states of aggregation, in fluid, ice, vapour, as well as the various uses and semantic fields of water. Once again, the project deals with language, image and existence, ‘reinforced’ autobiographically and multiply transformed.

Structure and form

With only a few exceptions, Jitka Hanzlová makes her photographs strikingly small. She does not treat herself to expansive size, does not occupy architecture, engages in no competition with the billboards characteristic of the recent decades’ streetscape. She is not looking to assert herself in the large-scale photography and painting that is hot on today’s art market, and instead works with a size that resembles a sign on a wall, a note, a page of writing, a tightly condensed remark and statement. These highly precise snippets, these flashes of lighting, angles of vision, incisions in the continuum of space and time produced with great attention to the balance of colour, to Type-C prints and their balance of light and dark, typically ever-so-slightly undersaturated as I have described them above, are usually installed without ornamentation, almost modestly, set in a wooden frame and hung at eye level on the wall.

Nevertheless, the inherent claim of these compact coloured images is no less than an earnest attempt to present fragments of truth,     to search for excerpts from reality that point beyond themselves and, connoting the relationships in the world and in the world of Jitka Hanzlová in particular, convey her perceptions of reality, her truths. Ultimately, we perceive, in the various photographic series she created in the past thirty years, step by step, image after image, a picture of the world emerging that tells of a great unity of plants, animals and humans, of lived, well-fed, bountiful seasons, of cycles of years and life, of a search for positive, invigorating and a rejection of negative, destructive energies.

Image follows image, often in a row as though she were writing out the words of a sentence on a wall. One view feeds another, one meaning changes preceding meanings, the visible evokes the invisible. The sequence of images was thought out with great care, so that individual photographs begin ‘talking’ to each other, so that a field of meanings, possibilities and probabilities unfolds in the mind of the observer – with breaks in between and a good deal of silence. Like field research, the works emerge through action, through searching, doing, through photographing. They are far from being cerebral art, conceptual art, or wanting to be such, though they visualise essential, fundamental ideas about human being today.

The light undersaturation (excepting the dark, engrossing images in Forest) lends many photographs a peculiar brightness, as if everything were illuminated simultaneously and needed hardly any contrast and black to justify its visual argument. And there, where Jitka Hanzlová sees the world her own way, where the world is different, where the world aches – she shows it, with angles, geometric lines, with acuity, pallor and gloom, with an atmosphere of rejection, of refusal.

The photographs’ format on the wall roughly corresponds to the format of a page on a table. In and with her photographs, Jitka Hanzlová ‘writes’ down her observations, her stories, her present, her quest for life, for meaning, for truth, photographically. Aware of the ultimate unrepresentability of truth in one or two or three images, but equally convinced that one can always circle and home in on, traverse and touch, formulate and discard and so at least to intuit it and grasp it fragmentarily. Knowing, on top of that, that each image carries its own visual truth. 

In conclusion

In one of the emails we exchanged about this essay, Jitka Hanzlová quoted the American poet, essayist and cultural critic David Levi Strauss: “Photographs by themselves certainly cannot tell ‘the whole truth’ – they are always only instants. What they do most persistently is to register the relation of the photographer to the subject – the distance from one to another – and this understanding is a profoundly important political process.” 13 A quote slipped to Jitka by her late friend John Berger.

A single pear tree does not make a forest – or does it? Each single thing counts, each sound, each silence, each light, each shadow – and also each plant, each animal, each human being. The future only holds a promise if we keep to this idea. The work of Jitka Hanzlová seems to embody it – in addition to the intrinsic value of her magically poetic images.

1                                              Jitka Hanzlová, unpublished notes, 2013.

2                                              Jitka Hanzlová, excerpt from an unpublished lecture, 2002.

3                                              John Berger, ‘Between Forest’, in: Jitka Hanzlová: Forest, Göttingen: Steidl, 2005.

4                                              Emanuele Coccia, cited in Marc Zollinger: ‘Die Natur ist der neue Gott’, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2. 6. 2018.

5                                              Ibid.

6                                              Ibid.

7                                              Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien, Insel, Frankfurt a. Main 1955.

8                                              John Berger, About Looking, Pantheon Books, New York 1980, pp. 3–28.

9                                              Ibid.

10                                            Ibid. Recently, the vegan movement has begun rethinking this relationship.

11                                            Alexander Mitscherlich, Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte. Anstiftung zum Unfrieden, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. Main 1965.

12                                            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_shot.

13                                            David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, Aperture, New York 1995, p. 10.