Fotograf Magazine

Each photograph in the collection Views from the Window of My Flat is important, and not solely from the point of view of aesthetics. Taken together, they reveal something more than a mere interest in variations on a rewarding theme.
Jiří Hanke (b. 1944) seems to be implying this: that photographs remain a section drawn from a larger entirety. This makes them all the more suited for a concentrated study of particularities and details. The penetration of the medium of photography, in any case, is no stranger to delving even to microscopic depths.
What generalization can be drawn from an examination of the always necessarily – but with Hanke, programmatically – incomplete shots? As we are not allowed to glimpse the square over which Jiří Hanke has lived for years, we are kept in constant suspense of the artificial supporting context of the series. We follow the shifts from one insight to another, as we wish to grasp the whole and understand what it articulates.