Exhibition opening: February 11, 2026
On view until: May 26, 2026
Where: Gallery S, Ljubljana Castle
Exhibition curator: Katarina Jurjavčič
Hanno Hardt (1934-2011) was an internationally recognized media theorist, world-renowned communication scholar, and dedicated photographer. He was born in Germany and worked most of his life in the United States, Germany and Slovenia.
He was a long-time professor of communication at the University of Iowa (USA), where he significantly shaped critical approaches to the study of media. After retiring in 2002, he continued his academic career at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana. He loved taking photographs and left behind documentary photo cycles that he created in the countries in which he lived. Her husband’s negatives, estimated at 60,000 images, were donated by Dr. Vida Zei to the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia in early 2024. Hanno Hardt understood photography as a key element of cultural and political life, since in his opinion it co-created a visual archive of people and places. He believed that history is shaped much more through images of time than through written narratives. People are always at the forefront of his photographs: he liked to photograph scenes from city life, especially more populated corners. He also liked to play with the inscriptions that people have on their T-shirts, or graffiti, which appear as text in his photography, since this is often lacking in his photographs.
Most of his photographs are sparsely documented and contain only a temporal dimension in terms of data, illustrated by the year in which the photograph was taken. Hanno Hardt was known for his long-term documentary-photographic projects of everyday life: in Ireland, the USA, the former East Germany, Croatia, Serbia, Italy and Slovenia. Hanno Hardt photographed Ljubljana market for ten years (from 1984 to 1994), he was involved in documenting the reading process (from 1990 to 2011), and his project Slovenes (1991 to 2008) is also outstanding, in which he depicted in images two decades of Slovene transition. This last project by Hardt is being upgraded in the photographic exhibition Hanno Hardt: Slovenes, Footprints of the Past.
The exhibition, which will be created under the auspices of the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia, has been prepared by Katarina Jurjavčič and will be on display in Gallery “S” at Ljubljana Castle from 12 February 2026.