The Albertina Museum in Vienna is currently showcasing a comprehensive retrospective of Czech photographer Jitka Hanzlova, featuring her celebrated documentation of how the 1989 political transformation changed her home village, alongside other renowned photographic series. The exhibition, expertly curated by Walter Moser, presents a complete overview of Hanzlova's career, including famous cycles such as Female, Horse, Forest, and her latest work Bohdanka, which continues her long-term observation of Rokytník.
In the late 1990s, the name Rokytník began circulating in European photography circles, quickly establishing Jitka Hanzlova's reputation. Today, she ranks among the premier league of art photography. Institutions in Germany, France, and London displayed her early works, with Vienna's Fotogalerie at WUK being among the pioneers. The 59-piece Rokytník collection, created between 1990 and 1994 in Hanzlova's North Bohemian hometown, was already shown there in 1996.
The decisive year was 1989. Seven years earlier, the then-23-year-old had fled from the communist dictatorship to Germany. In Bochum, where Hanzlova still lives today, she studied Visual Communication and Photography. The complete severing of all connections to family, language, and homeland made her feel like she was standing on one leg. However, this kept her alert and sharpened her perspective. When the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic unexpectedly collapsed in 1989, the exile could return to Rokytník for the first time, visiting several times a year to see the people and places she knew again, but now with fresh eyes.
Rokytník is a small village away from modern metropolises yet centrally located in Europe. In the early 1990s, this village that seemed frozen in time served as a lens through which one could observe how Eastern European poverty was disappearing and slowly being overlaid with the first signs of Western capitalism. Hanzlova operated as an insider, unlike photo reporters, TV teams, and photo essayists from the Magnum school who wanted to capture the system transition quickly with spectacular motifs. She could take her time to capture close-ups of people and their natural environment throughout all seasons.
In conversations, she likes to say: 'I don't search, I find.' Not once does the entire village come into view – panoramas are not this photographer's style. Alongside children, farmers, elderly people, animals, and simple houses, there are also hints at everyday living conditions: laundry on the line, homemade toys, old skis, a schnapps distiller's kettle, or a blooming fruit tree in green expanse – the long breath of small happiness in difficult times. What might be worthy of photographing is decided intuitively and subjectively.
As gentle and loving as Hanzlova's approach may be, her findings are equally precise, strictly classically composed, structural, and rich in reality. This represents a countermodel to the quasi-sociological research material with which art installations all too often pompously and boringly fill walls and rooms. One secret of these photographs, in which wit occasionally flashes, is the delicate, restrained coloring, with insular orange or red accents in the foreground serving as eye-catchers.
Unlike the village poem, the follow-up series Female (1997-2000) was created with a predefined concept, featuring women's portraits in urban settings, created in Düsseldorf, London, and Los Angeles. The photographer approached women she encountered by chance in parks and streets, seeking quiet interactions with them. These are consistently three-quarter portraits from half-distance, with the women looking into the camera with impassive expressions and serious gazes. Ciphers like clothing, hairstyle, or jewelry, as well as body language, discretely invite speculation about their living world or social status. Hanzlova aimed to capture individuality and emotional states, with a catalog text referring to 'shy complicity' and an 'intimacy of the unknown.'
Hanzlova pushed to the limits of what can be photographed when she roamed through forests around her home village, even at night. To counteract pathos and the stereotypes of this over-photographed subject, she limited herself in the Forest cycle to atmospheric elements and extreme image cuts and crops. As always with Hanzlova, hardness and beauty come close to each other. What appears monochrome and dark from a greater distance reveals threatening tangles of branches and transitions from dark blue to almost black in close view. She says she knows frightening states in forests not only from her childhood, but they still overwhelm her today. Nature is never untouched in Hanzlova's work, as writer John Berger noted about Forest – but it shows a hint of infinity.
For the extraordinary nature of Hanzlova's visual language that goes beyond the visible, popular terms like 'gentle' or 'empathetic' have been established, combined with 'unsentimental' and 'cool.' The scope that makes viewing so entertaining gives weight to the exhibition. One is accustomed to the Albertina luring visitors with flashy prominent names. However, it shows that an overview of the work of an artist known more as a specialist can also quickly gain attention and doesn't have to be a side offering.
