DOORWAY
In over 30 years of practice Jitka Hanzlová has portrayed the human, the urban and the natural and condensed these in her various photographic series and books:. Fragments of wholeness, existing in relationships that connect us – to others, to ourselves, to nature, to our surrounding. Developing present, instinctive and attentive gaze and questioning herself on identity and belonging, her personal experience of exile:, Hanzlová’s language sees through her subjects, seeks an inner matrix of existence and lets her experience of acting be the true
concept behind her photography.
Jitka Hanzlová returned to Reggio Emilia after 17 years. Invited by Fotografia Europea to create a new work on the theme of the festival. If in 2005 her attention was focused on some migrant groups, who shared the instability of their new situation, today she has returned to portray juveniles with a migration backround, trying to find their place in the world, to create a place to call home. “Stability” was one of the first words she wrote in her precious notebook.
In those intense days of exchanges, sharing experienced stories and silent dialogues that Hanzlová experienced with the portrayed subjects, she approached the Young faces of the boys and girls attentively and confidently – discovering places, meeting points in the city, and a humanity that Hanzlová never seemed to tire of.
The result is a portrait line of juveniles, being just on the threshold, in a state between. It is the Doorway of the title, the one that must be crossed in order to move, in which, however, everything is still potential and past and future seemingly collapse. It is only with the acceptance of this collapse that we can take a step forward, towards the future and the unknown, looking inside ourselves for the forces necessary to sustain the movement through new doorways.
