Each photograph in the collection Views from the Window of My Flat is important, and not solely from the point of view of aesthetics. Taken together, they reveal something more than a mere interest in variations on a rewarding theme.
Jiří Hanke (b. 1944) seems to be implying this: that photographs remain a section drawn from a larger entirety. This makes them all the more suited for a concentrated study of particularities and details. The penetration of the medium of photography, in any case, is no stranger to delving even to microscopic depths.
What generalization can be drawn from an examination of the always necessarily - but with Hanke, programmatically - incomplete shots? As we are not allowed to glimpse the square over which Jiří Hanke has lived for years, we are kept in constant suspense of the artificial supporting context of the series. We follow the shifts from one insight to another, as we wish to grasp the whole and understand what it articulates.
The organizing - or prejudiced - gaze of the viewer projects into the images even those thoughts generated by another experience. In the case of the author of the present article, we cannot discount that I have known the artist for a period of over a quarter of a century.
Jiří Hanke favors long-term conceptual projects. Just to give an idea, let us cite his previous books: Views from the Window of My Flat (1994), People from Podprůhon 1974-1989 (1995), The Little Gallery of the Savings Bank in Kladno 1977-1997 (1997), Echoes of a Generation (1998), and Stop Time (2003).
Hanke has photographed his native town, Kladno, since 1973. He has adopted its bleak, black-and-white poetics, suggestive of coal mining and high-grade steel foundries. Podprůhon is an old working class neighbourhood, where houses were built according to the rule of necessity. Their size was dictated by a modesty bordering on poverty. The photographer's reportage on the neighbourhood does not dispell the impression of an arbitrariness of form. It is rendered in various proportions and negative formats, but it is nonetheless thorough, street by street.(full article is available after purchasing a subscription - not available now)
Jiří Hanke (b. 1944) seems to be implying this: that photographs remain a section drawn from a larger entirety. This makes them all the more suited for a concentrated study of particularities and details. The penetration of the medium of photography, in any case, is no stranger to delving even to microscopic depths.
What generalization can be drawn from an examination of the always necessarily - but with Hanke, programmatically - incomplete shots? As we are not allowed to glimpse the square over which Jiří Hanke has lived for years, we are kept in constant suspense of the artificial supporting context of the series. We follow the shifts from one insight to another, as we wish to grasp the whole and understand what it articulates.
The organizing - or prejudiced - gaze of the viewer projects into the images even those thoughts generated by another experience. In the case of the author of the present article, we cannot discount that I have known the artist for a period of over a quarter of a century.
Jiří Hanke favors long-term conceptual projects. Just to give an idea, let us cite his previous books: Views from the Window of My Flat (1994), People from Podprůhon 1974-1989 (1995), The Little Gallery of the Savings Bank in Kladno 1977-1997 (1997), Echoes of a Generation (1998), and Stop Time (2003).
Hanke has photographed his native town, Kladno, since 1973. He has adopted its bleak, black-and-white poetics, suggestive of coal mining and high-grade steel foundries. Podprůhon is an old working class neighbourhood, where houses were built according to the rule of necessity. Their size was dictated by a modesty bordering on poverty. The photographer's reportage on the neighbourhood does not dispell the impression of an arbitrariness of form. It is rendered in various proportions and negative formats, but it is nonetheless thorough, street by street.(full article is available after purchasing a subscription - not available now)