In 1982 Jitka Hanzlová defected from the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and settled in Essen in West Germany. Since then she has sought to explore her experiences through photography, producing a body of work at once poetic and truthful. Hanzlová’s photography is in constant pursuit of the relationship between the individual and the context in which he or she lives. It scrutinizes the ways in which home and surroundings shape identity. In this series Hanzlová works with reference to the Renaissance tradition of portraiture which claimed to communicate the personality traits of an individual through their particular features. For Hanzlová, the portraits evoke an unwritten history of facial expression and familial connection that reaches across the centuries.