The Way of a Woman (or Woman Between the First and the Last Breaths) includes the photographs shot from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. The aim of the photo project is to show the woman’s life journey in all its diversity. The pictures have been carefully selected to create a sort of a story of entire life: birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age. Apart from the chronological depiction of the life stages the photographs illustrate the basic life values that have a great influence on us throughout all our life: maternity, family, struggle for certain ideas, leisure time, sport, art, entertainment, etc. What it means is that the works embrace the universal topics rather than depict a certain social environment or specific features of a certain country. Thus, it is a kind of a collage, a mix of impressions, a collective portrait of a European woman.   

The exhibition was on display in Czech Republic (1994 – the premiere showcase), Switzerland and Germany (1995), France (1999), Ukraine (2001), Hungary (2002), Russia (Moscow – 2003, 2012, Nizhny Novgorod – 2012), the Netherlands (2006), Slovakia and Austria (2007), Spain and Poland (2010) and Turkey (2011).   

The series does not represent a fixed and permanent set of photographs: it has been constantly renewed and replenished with new works, and therefore each exhibition featured a unique selection of art pieces.

“In 1992 they offered me and three other Czech photographers to take part in a creative contest to win a half a year scholarship in Bern, Switzerland. At that time I had an idea of compiling the photographs of the female residents of well-to-do Switzerland and the pictures capturing the life of women in the post-communist Czech state. So that is how the photo project has started and I have become a freelance photographer.   

While the work on the series officially began in Switzerland in 1993, it includes the photographs that had been made much earlier (for instance, some pictures of my classmates dating from 1973). Then I moved to France where I lucked into the joint British-German-French-Czech art project Strange Family organized by the Newcastle-based Side Gallery. Then my work continued in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, although the majority of the photographs were shot in the Czech Republic. I stopped shooting for the Way of a Woman project in 2003, when they launched an exhibition A Woman Between the First and the Last Breaths at the Old Town City Hall in Prague, which was dedicated to my 30-year-long career of a photographer. By the way, the year before that the publishing company KANT had brought out a monograph of the same name.     

It seems to me that women do not differ much from each other around the globe. I am interested in the subject of woman in general and I am far from bringing political motives or social aspects in the photo project. I did my best to focus on portraying a “Pan-European woman,” and it does not matter where the pictures were made (very often one can easily fail to identify a shooting location).    

I am not a conservative adherent of black-and-white photography, but I believe that the colour should be function-oriented rather than be a colour for colour’s sake. Besides, the black-and-white imagery provides a great advantage for portrait photography, as it helps to concentrate on the subject. Moreover, being a sort of a stylization of life, it gives free scope to one’s imagination.

I am not so naive as to deem that photography can change the world around us, fraught with controversy. Photography for me is what I am interested in, my source of joy, the opportunity to learn more about the places and people that I might have never seen in other circumstances. And I feel happy when my works resonate with the public and trigger some emotions in people.”

Dana Kyndrova