Jitka HanzlovaForest

Photographer Jitka Hanzlová’s new series, Forest, here accompanied by a John Berger essay, continues her work in and around the village where she grew up, leaving the town and its inhabitants for the forest. Her stark prints explore the Moravian woods of her youth—and all the naturally-occurring corridors, courtyards, haunted houses and gilded ponds there—as a kind of visible, perceptible “unknown” in herself and the viewer, as a dark spring, as the unfathomed depths from which we emerge. Though many of us don’t often go into the forest, we know that it is there, and we know that it is critical to both the way one imagines the world—light and dark, city and country, home and unknown territory—and to the physical processes, not least the manufacture of oxygen, that keep the world going. In this respect, Hanzlová’s work is once again, as it has been so directly in Female, and persistently in Rokytnik, meaningful sociopolitically as well as aesthetically.