Synopses & Reviews
The photographs in Cotton Rose were taken in the Gifu Prefecture of Japan. Hanzlová strongly resisted the long tradition of Japan travel journals showing a foreign and exotic Japan. She was aided in this by her own history of having left her village in the former Czech Republic for political reasons in 1983. The experience of having been a "foreigner" herself enabled her to step beyond cultural differences to make an intimate portrayal of a people and their own sense of home. Hanzlová's photographic voice has always been a muted and gentle mirror of her sympathetic approach, and in Japan she found a people and a landscape which perfectly suited her language.
Synopsis
Jitka Hanzlov has traversed contexts, identities and cultures in a quest for the meaning of belonging that lies at the heart of her images. The photographs in Cotton Rose were taken in the Gifu Prefecture of Japan. Hanzlov strongly resisted the long tradition of travel journals written about Japan, showing a foreign and exotic country. Since Jitka Hanzlov defected from the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1982 she has sought to explore her experiences through photography, producing a body of work at once poetic and truthful. Hanzlov 's photography is in constant pursuit of the relationship between the individual and the context in which people live. It scrutinizes the ways in which home and surroundings indelibly shape identity. Drawing on her own life story, Hanzlov 's photographs also speak of a more universal longing for a sense of place.
About the Author
Born 1958 in Nachod, Czechoslovakia, Jitka Hanzlová is currently resident in Essen, Germany. She studied photography at Essen University and has since worked as a photographer on her own projects. She was awarded the Otto Steinert Photography Prize in 1993 and European Photography Prize in 1995 and was shortlisted for The Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize 2000 and 2003. Hanzlova's work on "Rokytník" depicting the small Czech village where she grew up and her portraits of women in various countries in "Female" have won her acclaim in Europe and America.