Hana Hamplová

Hana Hamplová (née Hovorková; born 28 June 1951) is a Czech cinematographer and photographer. She graduated from Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague with a degree in cinematography. In the 1970s, she worked briefly as a cinematographer for Czechoslovak Television, and later began working as a freelance photographer. She is a member of the Association of Professional Photographers of the Czech Republic (member of Federation of European Professional Photographers). From 2006 to 2015, she taught at Michael, a private school for advertising and the arts.

Life She was born Hana Hovorková on 28 June 1951 in Prague. As a child, she spent the years 1956–1958 with her family in Beijing, where her father worked as a manager on the construction of film studios. In 1958, her father died in a plane crash while returning from Beijing; Hana Hamplová continued to grow up with only her mother and older brother Jan.

After graduating from elementary school, she attended the Nad Štolou High School in Letná from 1966 to 1969. From the age of sixteen, she developed an interest in photography and attended a photography club at the Biskupcova People’s School of Art under the guidance of Ján Šmok. In August 1968, during the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, she photographed the events unfolding in the streets of Prague, and in January 1969, she photographed the funeral of Jan Palach. In an interview for Memory of Nations, she describes the August invasion and normalization as a turning point. According to her, the relaxed atmosphere of the Prague Spring and the subsequent tightening of conditions was a moment that fundamentally influenced her entire generation. After graduating from high school, she worked for a year as a technical assistant at Czechoslovak Television. where she contributed to the graphic and visual design. She took portraits of authors for samizdat and documented unofficial exhibitions. In November 1989, she photographed demonstrations on Wenceslas Square. In April 1990, the Odeon publishing house commissioned her to reproduce the works of Jiří Kolář, who was still living in Paris at the time, for a monograph in the preparation. From 2006 to 2015, she taught photography at Michael, a private school of advertising and the arts.

Work A major impetus for her free creative photographic work was the design of the cover for the Bohumil Hrabal’s book Too Loud a Solitude, published in 1976 as samizdat. Hamplová works consistently with photography’s inherent expressive means and does not make any additional alterations to the negative or manipulate the positive in the darkroom to achieve special effects. This approach has not changed even with the transition to digital photography.

The magic of her photographs lies in her artistic sensibility and her focus on specific details. Amid the apparent chaos of disordered shapes, the selected and greatly magnified detail ceases to appear as mere randomness and becomes a new reality. Hamplová is interested in the aesthetic impact of the structures themselves and in a new interpretation of a fragment of everyday reality. She does not seek hidden meanings that might resemble objects, people, or landscapes. She finds elements of tension in the unexpected encounters of diverse materials, in a torn surface, and in the disrupted rhythm of the arrangement of lines. In her free photographic work, Hana Hamplová primarily chooses black-and-white or muted color palettes for her images. She captures small details of what she sees—wall surfaces, the folds of fabric, layers of corrugated cardboard, the weave of wire mesh, and the play of light and shadow on stone masonry. Her artistic vision is characterized by a complex combination of lines and tonal intensity. She strips the photographed subjects of their context and creates abstract compositions whose lyrical minimalism is reminiscent of the arte povera movement. For the exhibition "The Recycled World" at the University of Michigan (1990), she selected photographs depicting art books disintegrating amid bales of shredded paper as a metaphor for the fragility of human knowledge and memory.

Free creation (selection)

She regularly returns to the theme of paper and its materiality. By abstracting from the function of paper, she evokes both familiar and entirely new associations with the structure of wood or abstract landscapes. She has created two thematically unified series, the first of which emphasizes the tranquility and harmony of layered, isolated elements, while the second, which makes use of torn or burnt paper, expresses existential unease, change, and decay. Artists such as Alberto Burri and Svatopluk Klimeš have used fire as a symbol of both eternally burning life and destructive power in the visual arts. Jan Kříž describes Hana Hamplová’s technically brilliant series of photographs as a lasting contribution to Czech art in his review.

Portraits (selection)

Exhibitions (selection) 1984 Prague, zasedací síň ČSS Praha 7, curator Ján Šmok 1987 Sovinec (with Josef Hampl) 1988 Olomouc, Galerie Pod podloubím 1990 Cultural Centre Opatov, Prague 2017 Frye Art Museum, Seattle 2024 Klenová Castle Stewardship