2024-03-28 01:09:59
He started as a musician, he also gave concerts with folk singer Jaroslav Hutka. In the end, however, Jiří Hanke took a different path. He became one of the most recognized Czechoslovak photographers – right now he is celebrating his upcoming 80th birthday with several exhibitions, as well as fifty years with a camera. And when Jiří Hanke is mentioned, one immediately thinks of Kladno. It is his city – whose peculiar beauty he can capture.
We talk with Jiří Hank (*1944) in the small exhibition hall of the Cabinet of Photography at the Kladno Castle. The photographs on the walls briefly remind us of the topics he dealt with during his fifty years of photographic work. Of course, most of them revolve around his native Kladno.
“I think it’s good to photograph something you know,” he explains. “Although sometimes it’s good to be enchanted by something new and unknown,” he adds. He started taking photographs as a small boy. “My father was a passionate photographer, I probably had a small camera when I was six years old,” he recalls. However, he considers the year 1974 to be the real beginning of his photographic journey. That was when he was thirty years old.
Photographer Jiří Hanke plays and sings at an exhibition of his collages. The man with the camera is his son Michael, also an excellent photographer. | Photo: Tomáš Vocelka
From big beat and folk to photography
“I was originally a musician, playing in the Barclay beat band and later playing and singing my own folk songs. When I got married in 1968, my wife was painting and I didn’t want to be left behind,” he says. He tried but was not satisfied with the result. So he got into collages and photography. By the way, his collages can now also be seen in Kladno, at the exhibition “My bow” in the Central Bohemian Science Library.
In the end, however, photography prevailed. “But I didn’t hang music on a nail. I photographed it for years, the advantage was that I knew its backstage well and I got basically everywhere,” he says. At that time, his pictures appeared, for example, on the pages of Melodie or Gramorevue magazines. “I found myself in photography, I discovered that it is a medium that can tell stories.”
The charm of a poor worker’s colony
In addition to music, Jiří Hanke was also enchanted by Kladno. He photographed its transformations, he also fell in love with the working-class district of Podprůhon with its narrow streets and small houses. “It was a rather backward place at the time, without sewerage or gas. The workers who moved to Kladno to follow the expanding industry built shacks there. Some of them first built wagons there, where they lived, and then walled them up. Each house had its history,” explains Hanke.
From the collection People from Podprůhon (1974-1989) | Photo: Jiří Hanke
The writer František Stavinoha said about Podprųhon that it is “architecture from paycheck to paycheck”. “The worker had a bit of money and built a sty for a pig, for example. From the next paycheck, he added a little something,” explains Hanke. He fell in love with the undercarriage. “People there knew me and told me their own stories,” says the photographer.
History passed under the windows of his apartment, and even a famous philosopher wrote about it
Jiří Hanke usually works with large collections that have been created over several years or even decades. It is logical, because he is fascinated by the passage of time and tries to capture it. The most famous of these files became “Views from the window of my apartment”.
From the file Views from the window of my apartment (1981-2003) | Photo: Jiří Hanke
“It started completely unplanned. We lived on the square (then it bore the name of Klement Gottwald). I woke up one morning and the lindens under our windows had been cut down. That’s when the first photograph was taken,” Hanke describes. He realized that history was running under his windows and tried to capture it. May Day parades passed through here, Red Army soldiers laid wreaths, the Lidice cycling race passed there, people celebrated the hockey victories of the national team with flags.
The well-known philosopher Vilém Flusser also wrote about Hanke’s collection, who also dealt with the philosophy of photography, among other things. “It was his only article that he wrote about a particular photographer. It was published in the European Photography magazine at the time,” recalls Jiří Hanke.
Portraits of the first entrepreneurs, from nightclub owners to Poldi Kladno
Hanke photographed during the normalization period, during and after the Velvet Revolution. His pictures of Kladno from the 1980s are imbued with irony and record the atmosphere that preceded the fall of the regime. In 1989, when the communist regime was collapsing, he again focused on Kladno. “I didn’t go to Prague, I thought there were enough photographers there,” he says. Time confirmed that it was the right decision, and his Kladno pictures were also appreciated in the USA.
After the revolution, he was attracted by newly born Kladno businessmen – from the small ones who sold goods in the garage, through the owners of nightclubs to the owner of Poldi Kladno, Vladimír Stehlík. Another of his collections deals with the post-revolutionary transformation of Kladno’s peripheries. “The poetry of the periphery has always been close to me,” he explains.
It is not possible to mention all the series on which Jiří Hanke worked during the last fifty years in a short text, but we remind you of many of them in the photo gallery next to this article. For anyone who wants to remember them, we can recommend the currently ongoing exhibition Jiří Hanke: 50 years with photographs in Kladno Castle.
Jiří Hanke: photos from the 50 YEARS exhibition with a photo (Kladenský zámek, 2024) | Photo: Jiří Hanke
433 exhibitions and how photographer Zdeňek Tmej did push-ups with clapping
However, Jiří Hanke is not only known for his photographs, but also for the Small Gallery of Česká spořitelna in Kladno, which he founded and led. It had great prestige throughout Czechoslovakia, almost all important Czech and Slovak photographers exhibited there. Today, it is followed by the Cabinet of Photography in Kladno Castle.
For each exhibition in Spořitelna, Jiří Hanke also photographed a portrait of its author. Always under the clock there. “I asked everyone to do something there. Someone did a handstand, for example,” Hanke says.
Then, in the exhibition hall, they will stop at a picture of the famous photographer Zdeněk Tmej, who exhibited in Kladno a set of photos from Ročník 21, taken during the total deployment during the Second World War. “Although Zdeněk was already almost seventy years old, he was in excellent physical condition. He lay down, then threw himself into the air and did a push-up with a clap. He repeated it for me a total of thirteen times, so that I could be sure that the photo was successful,” Hanke describes. At that time, of course, photographs were taken on film, there was no possibility to check on the display how the picture turned out.
Hanke’s jubilee will be commemorated by a number of exhibitions
As we have already mentioned, two of the exhibitions related to Jiří Hanke’s 80th birthday celebrations are currently underway. One is currently taking place in the Cabinet of Photography at Kladno Castle and will last until April 24 (Jiří Hanke: 50 years with photography). The second, focused on collages from the seventies, can be seen in the Central Bohemian Science Library in Kladno (Jiří Hanke: Má poklona, until April 25).
However, others are also on the way: From April 25, the second part of the exhibition at the castle will follow, focusing on photos of Kladno from the 1980s. In autumn, the photographer’s work should be commemorated by the exhibition of double portraits, Imprints of a Generation, at the Leica Gallery in Prague.