JITKA HANZLOVA

Posted on 2012-11-05

In 1982 Jitka Hanzlová defected from the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and settled in Essen in West Germany. Since then she has sought to explore her experiences through photography, producing a body of work at once poetic and truthful. Hanzlová’s photography is in constant pursuit of the relationship between the individual and the context in which he or she lives. It scrutinizes the ways in which home and surroundings indelibly shape identity. Drawing on her own life story, Hanzlová’s photographs also speak to a more universal longing for a sense of place.

The photographer develops her work in series, beginning with Rokytník made between 1990 and 1994, the village in Eastern Bohemia which she left a decade earlier. Of central significance to Hanzlová, Rokytník is the creative bedrock for everything that follows. Taken together, her photography constitutes an imaginative investigation of ‘belonging’, whether a commentary on the alienation of city life or the photographer’s deep identification with the mysterious northern forests. This is essentially a form of extended portraiture and Hanzlová has most recently turned to portrait photography itself, in particular exploring the potential of Renaissance archetypes.

This is the first major retrospective of Hanzlová’s photography over the last two decades. Emerging from her experience of two different cultures and political systems, her work is a profound meditation on European identity in a post-Cold War world.

Exhibition runs through till February 3rd, 2013

Scottish National Gallery
The Mound
Edinburgh
EH2 2EL

www.nationalgalleries.org

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CARTIER-BRESSON – A QUESTION OF COLOUR

Posted on 2012-11-05

It is well-known that Cartier-Bresson was disparaging towards colour photography, which in the 1950s was in its early years of development; his reasoning was based both on the technical and aesthetic limitations of the medium at the time.

Featuring 10 Cartier-Bresson photographs never before exhibited in the UK alongside over 75 works by 14 international acclaimed photographers, this extensive showcase will illustrate how photographers working in Europe and North America adopted and adapted the master’s ethos famously known as the ‘decisive moment’ to their work in colour. Though they often departed from the concept in significant ways, something of that challenge remained: how to seize something that happens and capture it in the very moment that it takes place.

Exhibition runs through till January 27th, 2013

Somerset House
Terrace Rooms & Courtyard Rooms, South Wing
Strand
London
WC2R 1LA

www.somersethouse.org.uk

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TOM WOOD – MEN AND WOMEN

Posted on 2012-11-05

Editing from long-term and previously unseen bodies of work, such as the Football Grounds, Shipyard and Docks and Women’s Market, Tom Wood has re-evaluated these images through a creative collaboration with artist Padraig Timoney. Grouping the images in a non-chronological order under the headings Men and Women, the exhibition will showcase a curated selection of these photographs, soon to be published as two separate books by Steidl.The installation of the photographs will reflect the sequencing of the books mixing the different formats, styles and processes. This arrangement will highlight the formal correspondences and relationships between pictures as well as Wood’s prolonged involvement with his subject matter. His photographs include both candid and posed portraits of people alone or in groups. Images of strangers are interspersed with those of friends and family and are often made from repeated engagements with particular locales.

Trust and empathy are both key elements in Wood’s practice and his photographs are the result of considered observation, offering affirmative responses to moments from the lives of those he pictures.

Opposite – Not Miss New Brighton, 1978/79

Exhibition runs through till January 6th, 2013

The Photographers’ Gallery
16 – 18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW

thephotographersgallery.org.uk

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