Jolana Havelková is one of the best known contemporary photographers. However, some of her work cannot be fitted into traditional categories or ascribed to a particular medium. She often surprises with new, distinct approaches. Generally speaking, she has long been involved in photography as a medium and its utilisation in contemporary art, from the first non-manipulated image to those works that arise as a combination of various different techniques and approaches.
In the project Hledání místa / Searching for a Place she drew on the principle of mail art and idiosyncratic diaries were the result. In the cycle Podoby mých přátel / Forms of my Friends (since 1996) she processes the theme of identity and takes photographs of her friends and family – people of different generations and social classes – wearing no clothes or any other outward signs of identification. These diaries are extended in the cycle Něco o mně /Something About Me (since 1999), in which a series of self-portraits arise created through random camera shots. The cycle Dočasná setkání /Temporary Encounters (since 1999) features magical portraits on the border of the real and dream world. This theme is pursued in many similar works that could be characterised as minimalist, e.g. the cycle of landscape details Co zbylo z léta / What Was Left of Summer (since 2000), a collection of photographs created from scanned children’s clothes that examines parental love (Pravidelná dávka emocí / Regular Dose of Love, since 2002), the cycle krajina 06 / landscape O6, shot using a mobile telephone camera and presented mainly as the projection of a photograph, První bruslení / First-Time Skating (since 2008), which records the traces of children’s skates in ice, or the collection examining our perception of real and fictive space entitled Původní plán / Original Plan (since 2008). Since 2005 she has been working with the transformation of music, especially the compositions of František Kmoch, which she scans and completes using a computer (Návrh na změnu partitury / Proposal for an Alteration of the Score). The result is pictures in which simple geometrical forms with fragments of notes predominate. These scores are closest to the procedures used in Lettrism, except that a fascination with letters is here replaced with one for notes, their form, rhythm and dynamic.
