Jitka Hanzlová – Forest

Hanzlová was forced to leave her native Czech village in 1982.  She found herself in Germany knowing little of the language or the place and The Forest records her return to the forest of her childhood and probably not surprisingly she ‘has created an oeuvre that engages with notions of belonging and alienation.’  (Tejeda, I. and Tejeda, J. 2012).

We both take photographs of trees, but they will never be the same as her experiences and mine are so totally different.  I don’t know forests like Hanzlová’s.  Mine are the mild-mannered, comfortable woodlands of the south-east. Mine are ones that I have known all my life.  Where mine reflect the gentle nature of my woods, her photographs are stark; there is an eyrie quality that both lures us in and warns us to stay out. Perhaps this is some kind of primal fear, a relic of when fearsome beasts roamed the forests, and we were as likely to be hunted as to hunt.  There are many literary allusions to this, Berger mentions it in his essay, so does Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis’ populates his Narnian woodlands with dryads.

She always photographed alone in the forest and on occasion felt an unexplainable fear when the forest sounds dropped away and she was left with silence. (Berger,2013) have often felt that woodlands or forests have a sense of themselves as a whole and in John Berger’s essay ‘Jitka Hanzlová: Forest he remarks that ‘A forest is also a meeting-place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth’.

She offer’s glimpses of the forest, using artificial light to illuminate tufts of grass or a tree branch or she waits for the mists to come down and obscure the view.  By restricting what we can see we get only snapshots of understanding. Perhaps like the flashes of memory sparked by reality of the place.

A selection of her work can be viewed on the Yancey Richardson website 

‘The distance between us‘ is a collection of photographs of trees as inspired by poet Joyce Kilmer

References

Buchanan, K. (2021) ‘The Distance Between Us’, Katies Photographic Journey, 2 March. Available at: https://katie9.home.blog/2021/03/02/the-distance-between-us/ (Accessed: 24 May 2021).

Berger, J., 2013. Understanding a photograph. 16th ed. Great Britain: Penguin Group.

Jitka Hanzlova (no date). Available at: https://www.yanceyrichardson.com/exhibitions/jitka-hanzlova3?view=slider (Accessed: 24 May 2021).

Tejeda, I. and Tejeda, J. (2012) Jitka Hanzlova. Madrid, Spain: TF Editores. Available at: http://www.jitkahanzlova.com/about.htm (Accessed: 24 May 2021).