Jiří Hanke is one of the most important personalities of contemporary Czech photography, not only as a great photographer, but also as a tireless curator, who prepared over 450 exhibitions between 1977 and 2024, and as an organizer of photographic workshops. The most famous of his extensive photographic works are the series People from Podprůhon, about the disappearing traditional way of life of the inhabitants of the old part of Kladno, and Views from the Window of My Flat, in which he for twenty-two years photographed various situations and building modifications in the small space of the square below his apartment, Entrepreneurs, consisting of gently ironic portraits of Kladno’s pioneers of private business, and the portrait series Echoes of a Generation, based on physiognomic and psychological comparisons of parents and their offspring. He has worked on all of them for a long time, but while he has already completed his older works, the Impressions of Generations series spans nearly four decades, and even the current exhibition does not represent its final form.

Compositionally simple photographs with direct views of the subjects into the lens and through it into the eyes of the viewers, and with an important role of the home or work environment, are stylistically loosely related to the iconic works of August Sander. Portraits of celebrity artists and athletes, as well as “ordinary” people, fascinate with the juxtapositions of the physical appearance and sometimes differences in the faces and figures of grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren. But also by the similarities and contrasts of their facial expressions or clothing. Significant details of the environment also play an important role. In contrast to the 1998 book edition of Echoes of a Generation, the current exhibition at Leica Gallery Prague works much more with time, as it includes portraits of the same people and in many cases their children and grandchildren created over decades. On the one hand, it is a picture of the inevitable ageing that marks the faces and bodies of the subjects, but on the other hand, it also shows that the genes of the portrayed are carried on in their descendants. Hanke often makes do with only a few portraits at different time intervals, but four generations of the Povondrovi family are represented in thirty photographs.  He shows that even at the age of eighty, he is still creating works of extraordinary strength in terms of content and visuals. This is illustrated by excerpts from Karel Greif’s new film about Jiří Hanke, which can be seen at the exhibition.

Vladimír Birgus

Jiří Hanke

Born on 15 April 1944 in Kladno, where he still lives. After graduating from the eleven-year high school he started working in the Kladno branch of the State Savings Bank. In his childhood, he took photographs under the influence of his father, but in his youth, he was mainly interested in music (he played guitar in the beat group Barclay and performed solo with his own repertoire) and created collages from magazine clippings. He has been a systematic photographer since 1974, when he became a member of the creative group Ateliér in Kladno. He focuses mainly on large-scale series of documentary and portrait photographs, which are often created over many years. His works have been presented in more than a hundred solo exhibitions and are part of many important collections (e.g. the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the National Gallery in Prague, the Prague City Gallery, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York). His books include Views from the Window of My Flat (1994, 2013), People from Podprůhon (1995), Imprints of a Generation (1998), Other Views (together with Jiřina Hankeová, 2002), Stop Time (2003), Jiří Hanke: Photographs (2008), Kladno Under the Skin (2013), Searching for America (2014) and Kladno Velvet (2029).

In 1977 he founded the Small Gallery in the Savings Bank in Kladno. He held 433 exhibitions there until its closure in 2019.  Since 2019, he has prepared another 20 exhibitions for the Cabinet of Photography at Kladno Castle. In 2011, the Association of Professional Photographers of the Czech Republic awarded him the title of Personality of Czech Photography for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2014 he received the Kladno City Award. His wife Jiřina, son Michael, daughter Lucie and grandsons Dominik and Vojtěch are also devoted to photography.