Jitka Hanzlová

From The Photographer's Gallery: "After Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in 1990, Jitka Hanzlová was able to return from a period of long exile to her tiny home village of Rokytnik, in Northern Bohemia. Her extraordinary suite of colour photographs chronicle a tight community, still living close to the land. Bathed in a brilliant, techni-coloured light, these images capture a life rooted in a particular place and lived at a different pace. 'I discovered the tension of slowness and was fascinated by people...embedded in their surroundings,' she says. In Rokytník, Hanzlová rediscovered an ancient way of life whose harsh, sometimes brutal realities, are offset by moments of deep beauty and surreal poetry."