Jaroslava Hatláková

1904–1989

Jaroslova Hatláková (Czech, 1904–1989) graduated from the Czechoslovak Business Academy in Prague. At the age of 21 she married a high placed bank official, Jindřich Hatlák, who was also an amateur photographer. Married and without children, she had enough free time to become thoroughly familiar with her husband’s hobby, and in 1934 she began to study photography at the State school of Graphic Art in Prague, which she completed in 1938. With the beginning of the Second World War material worries at that time and later forced Hatláková to pursue photography as a trade only. She worked as a photographer until the time of her death. Her meticulously maintained photographic work dating from the 1930s began to catch the attention of the professional public only in 1978. Her first independent exhibition, accompanied by a publication, was in France in 1988, from where she returned in poor health; she died shortly afterward in Prague.