Eva Heyd’s photographic work and artistic progress are closely connected to her personal life and the paths she chose to take, as well as the era she lived through and experienced.

Together with other photographers, who got together at the Strahov Photo Club in the seventies, she focused on documentary photography. Portraits and nudes from the Women series are an exceptionally sensitive testimony to the lives of the author’s contemporaries, who allowed her to enter their privacy and their inner world.

A significant turning point in Eva Heyd’s life was her emigration to the USA in the mid-80s. Life in New York with all the freedoms that the city offered, in contrast to her native city Prague, which was under totalitarian rule at the time, also brought the author new professional insights. The mixture of impressions from the city was one of the inspiring stimuli for creating photomontages, a technique which she already started to use in Prague. Another source of inspiration was her collaboration with major New York art museums, for which she photographed art objects for many catalogs. To this day a combination of photography and glass is an integral part of her free form art.

Another important time in the author’s life journey was the year 2005. After twenty years, she returned to the Czech Republic and settled in Rožmitál pod Třemšínem. Moving from a bustling metropolis, she found herself in the privacy of a small town. This fundamental change brought new themes into Eva Heyd’s photographic artwork. She gradually became acquainted with the mysterious landscape of the Brdy region and was able to capture the atmosphere of places that encourage quiet contemplation in her photographs. Her lifelong interest in history continues to attract her to places marked by human activities that are centuries old and also recent, both affecting the landscape in some way. How to now perceive the energy in a region that was so influenced by the religiosity of the Holy Mountain, where in the past tens of thousands of believers pilgrimaged to see miracles of the Virgin Mary? How to depict the contradictions in the actions of people who built industrial structures and eventually abandoned them? How to capture the feeling that deteriorated places evoke? How to suggest associations that a detail from nature elicits?

Reality versus emotion. The fundamental contradiction, a principle that connects Eva Heyd’s work in all stages of her creation, just like photomontage, layering impressions, thoughts, memories, and knowledge. The images created by the author contain messages that inspire our individual search for connections.

                                                                                    Hana Ročňáková