STILLS OF PEACE

S.L.M. 00 – ZEROZEROSULLIVELLODELMARE / PESCARA

FLÂNERIE
JILL HARTLEY 

Curated by Paolo Dell’Elce

Jill Hartley began her long journey with her camera along the streets of an worn-out Poland, which was preparing for the great internal social and political upheavals that had repercussions on the whole of Europe and that constituted the prodromes of the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union at the end of the 1970s. Jill was an acute and discreet witness of this exceptionally important moment in history. Her photographing ‘on her two legs’ gave her the opportunity to encounter events, almost to foresee them, and then to capture them with her camera at the maximum correspondence moment. The most important event that the young photographer exposed herself to and could no longer escape was the epiphany of what is human. Love, as longing for life, as hope and as a dream, is the ‘prime reason’ that drives Jill to wander the world. After Poland, Jill Hartley fell in love with Mexico to the point of choosing it as the country where to live and work in: ‘How can you explain a spell? It might have something to do with what we are missing at a certain moment. I suppose Mexico was like an antidote to my life in Paris’. Since the 1980s, she has been photographing on Mexican soil on several occasions and, as she had already done in Poland, Jill has managed to deeply connect with the places and their inhabitants and her photographic work is as close as possible to the anthropic dimension in which she is embedded.