…Our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.
—Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space
—Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space
To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Thomas Beachdel
A Return Home: Between Memory and Feeling, Presence and Absence
There is a poetical reverberation associated with returning home, or at least that is what is imagined when one has been far away for a long time. This fantasy of return is deep-seated. It is like a seed dispersed by the wind from the site of its conception where dreams began to form. It expands into the world to the point where it collapses in on itself and it is unclear what is real or imagined—it teeters. The final image of Marie Tomanova’s It Was Once My Universe, titled Was It Just a Dream? (2019) (fig. 1), embodies in its naming and position the ambiguities of the experience of her return home after nearly a decade away, during which time she was unable to go back. It calls into question the reality of Tomanova’s experience and the unreality of her return, aspects even more widely pronounced in the slippery relationship the photographs have with time. While most of the images carry a date stamp in their lower right corner, a characteristic further cementing the traditional operative function of the photograph as a document tied to a very specific moment and place, the date stamp is set to the time zone of New York City and not to that of the Czech Republic where the images were taken. This discrepancy exposes a fundamental disjunction in the photographic trace of Tomanova’s experience of returning home, baring and reifying the fundamental instability of that experience. In a 2020 interview Tomanova states, “I moved to the US in early 2011 and used photography to work through my feelings of dislocation. When things were difficult, I idealised ‘home’ in my mind. After eight years, I finally returned to Czech in late 2018. I was unprepared for the deep confusion and conflict I felt; I had become alien, and yet I still belonged. It was home, but so was America.”[1] In Poetics of Space, a book about the complex human relationship to space, primarily the home, Gaston Bachelard identifies the instability of dreams of home, an aspect through which Tomanova’s statement can be understood. He writes, “…at times dreams go back so far into an undefined, dateless past that clear memories of our childhood home appear to be detached from us. Such dreams unsettle our daydreaming and we reach a point where we begin to doubt that we ever lived where we lived. Our past is situated elsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality.”[2] While Bachelard writes about the abstracted position of the dreamer, likely one at some temporal and geographical distance away from the home, Tomanova inhabited both that abstracted position while she was in America dreaming of home between 2011 and 2018 and, also, the actual experience of the return home in late 2018. Perhaps it is this aspect of confusion and conflict about place—home in particular—that is the generator of the power that lies at the heart of It Was Once My Universe. It is about returning home, but it is not only about some projected idealization of that experience, it is also about the precariousness, and even difficulty, of that act.
The photographs that comprise It Was Once My Universe were taken between late December 2018 and early January 2019, a brief period of twenty-one days that fell not only on the cusp of Christmas and the new year but also during the significant family event of Tomanova’s mother’s remarriage. The images are essentially about being home. They are about memories and places and identity. They are about a visioning or a revisioning of self in place, a process that Tomanova established in earlier work. When she started photographing herself after coming to the United States, something she began in earnest and seriously in about 2012, Tomanova first took pictures of herself while she worked as an au pair, photographing herself in the environments in which she found herself as a means of being seen, or visible, if only by and to herself. This early work, loosely titled Displacements, can be seen in an image such as Hotel Hallway (2013) (fig. 2) in which Tomanova stands with a grocery bag and a folding bed in a hallway of a hotel. The image evokes a sense of placelessness and disposability, while at the same time depicts the coverage of basic needs, refusing to veer off into the hopelessly sentimental or morose. There is power here, and Tomanova uses the photograph to assert herself and her presence.
The assertion of presence can be seen in an image taken the first day being home in the Czech Republic, In Dad’s Sweater (All That Is Left) (2018) (page 13), establishing Tomanova herself as a part of the landscape of her family and her family home. Standing behind her house in a field where she used to work with her family as a child tending the vineyards, Tomanova photographs herself wearing the jeans that she left at home before leaving for the United States in 2011 and, more significantly, wearing her father’s old green sweater, the only physically tangible object of his that she still has. He died two days before her sixteenth birthday. This amalgamation of place, memory, object, and past combines with the immediacy of the photographic image itself with its New York City time zone date stamp to create a temporal, geographical, and emotional complexity that speaks to the challenges of being home, shifting notions of identity, and the process of self-portraiture. It is about being in the past and the present. It is about growing up and changing. It is about seeing your old self and your current self. It is about what you have lost and what you still have. It is about being away and being home. It is about being between places and times.
The strategy of self-assertion through self-portraiture and a specific connection to place, or a landscape, that was established in the early Displacements work was extended into Tomanova’s self-portraits in nature. She began to photograph herself in the American landscape as a way of not only emotionally connecting to her childhood past, much of which was spent in the fields and woods around her home, but also as a means of seeing, or picturing, herself in America during the long, difficult years of living there and being unable to return home. These self-portraits in nature are a dense body of work in Tomanova’s practice that have yet to be closely examined. Not only do they allow Tomanova to place, see, and visualize herself in the American landscape as a means of asserting presence, but through the close contact of her body with natural elements, such as trees, flowers, rocks, and water, Tomanova connects bodily with the landscape. It is as much about feeling it with her body as it is about picturing herself in it. In this way, there is a more complete merging of self and surrounding that conveys a wide gamut of associations, from the Weston-like formal studies of body and rock, such as Untitled (Self Portrait) (2016) (fig. 3), to an image such as Untitled (Self Portrait) (2016) (fig. 4) in which Tomanova plays with notions of gender and identity. The self-portrait in nature is a vast field of experimentation for Tomanova, and perhaps its greatest aspect, one that can best be seen in the breadth of the body of work itself, is the idea of freedom. In the American landscape, in places wholly unrelated to where she grew up, Tomanova has found a studio for discovering herself. But this process of self-discovery can also be difficult, as seen in an image such as Untitled (Self Portrait) (2016) (fig. 5) where Tomanova does not attempt to effortlessly merge her body or self with the American landscape, but rather seems to struggle to find her place in it. The image is almost primeval in its evocation of birth. Tomanova, her nude body covered in red marks and pine needles, has arranged herself fetally between armlike roots of a tree on a promontory overlooking a river.
Given the intricate relationship between identity and place in Tomanova’s self-portrait work in the United States, perhaps it is unsurprising, then, to find a similar complexity in an image in It Was Once My Universe, such as Mom’s Coat (2018) (fig. 6). It shows Tomanova standing in an old quarry near her home that she used to visit with her family and friends. She is wearing brand new shoes from New York City and a coat that her mother had made during the period when the Czech Republic was under Communist rule and access to goods was severely restricted, forcing people to make what they could not otherwise obtain. Growing up, most of Tomanova’s clothes were either homemade or handed down from her older sisters, and often both. The coat is emblematic, not only generally of this politically repressive past and the efforts of people to negotiate that, but it is very specifically linked to Tomanova and her particular family history, one that she revisits by wearing the coat and creating the photograph.
The photograph connects Tomanova with the geographical landscape of her childhood, as well as her family’s past, but it is a complicated relationship, as can be seen in the way Tomanova has structured the photograph. It seems off balance in some way, as if Tomanova is on unstable ground. The image twists and distorts in a peculiar way. Tomanova has positioned her body so that it is the dividing point of the quarry wall of the background into light and dark. The horizon line is not at all straight or even. The dark wall of the quarry on the right side of the image recedes while the quarry wall on the left side comes into the foreground and the foreground seems to drop off. The result is a distorting wormhole-like perspective that at one and the same time destabilizes the image and subtly invites the viewer into a private moment, a private space. It is a space of dreaming. Standing with hands in pockets, eyes closed, head against a cloud, wearing her mother’s old coat, Tomanova’s body seems firmly rooted but also seems to move, sway, or drift, perhaps by the wind that creates a fold in the lower half of the coat. The image has the strange quality of communicating the feeling of being absolutely still and stable, but also transitory and skewed. It can be read in line with the conflicted feeling Tomanova has mentioned about being home. The date stamp is December 31, 2018. A new year is just hours away.
Throughout It Was Once My Universe, Tomanova addresses her presence, loss, memory, and identity as aspects of place, particularly place as a space that produces deep echoes of the past imbued with personal meaning. This can be seen in the self-portrait work in which Tomanova invokes the relationship between her current self and the landscape of her past. Sometimes this relationship is unclear, and this lack of clarity may be one of the profound strengths of It Was Once My Universe, as it is fundamentally about Tomanova’s process of self-discovery in returning home, a process for which she was not prepared. She unfolds this experience through image-making, one that, like memory and feeling, can conceal. In Bedroom (2018) (fig. 7), for example, Tomanova photographs herself in a mirror in her childhood room. Her face is obscured by the flash from the camera, the representation of self and of the space is only partial. There is an illegibility that hides in the powerful flash that obscures important features, such as identity. Beneath this explosive surface, the face—the great carrier of meaning, of connection, in Tomanova’s Young American work, as can be seen in Elyanna (2018) (fig. 8)—is missing. This lack of distinguishing facial features may suggest a struggle with identity that spans the breadth of Tomanova’s oeuvre, as can be noted not only in the Displacements work mentioned earlier, such as Hotel Hallway, but also in the self-portrait in nature work, such as Untitled (Self Portrait) (fig. 4). It can also be found in Tomanova’s earlier expressionistic painting practice, which can be seen in the headless horseman in the left-hand side of Bedroom, and in the plethora of young headless female bodies—self-portraits—in Paintings (2019) (page 72).
This ongoing struggle with identity is extended into Tomanova’s relationship to place in It Was Once My Universe. Some images, such as Self Portrait with Mikulov (Hometown) (2018) (page 107), for example, a subject Tomanova specifically revisits twice in the book, are extremely straightforward, although not entirely legible. In this image, Tomanova photographs herself on a hill behind her house, overlooking the town in the background with its recognizable Mikulov Castle and bell tower, as well as the seventeenth-century pilgrimage site with the Chapel of St. Sebastian and Stations of the Cross, referred to locally as the Holy Hill (Svatý Kopeček). Using the tight, flashed, chest-up portrait convention Tomanova established with her Young American work, Tomanova is both part of and apart from the landscape of her town. While the image is structurally simple, reading Tomanova’s expression is not. Her eyes pierce, but they do not reveal.
Self-Portrait with Mikulov (Hometown) is the first in a series of three photographs Tomanova created in the same location at the same time, and while they are not presented directly as a series in It Was Once My Universe, together they form a narrative reflecting Tomanova’s approach to place, perhaps even tracing the emotional or psychic shift during her experience. The first image, in which Tomanova’s expression seems conflicted, or fundamentally unrevealing on some level, is followed in the sequence by Mikulov (2018) (page 88), a photograph taken from roughly the same vantage point with the Mikulov Castle and Holy Hill in the background, but Tomanova herself is missing in this image, and the focal plane has been lowered to include more of the ground below the hill from which Tomanova took the photograph. The result is a vertiginous foreground of greens, trees, and fields, split almost centrally by a small, single-lane road. Like Mom’s Coat, the perspective is skewed and disorienting. This landscape of Mikulov without Tomanova is at once both picturesque and dizzying. It is almost as if Tomanova took this image to see what it would look like without her presence, or as a means of trying to figure out her place, which becomes clear in the final image of the sequence, Self Portrait with Mikulov (2018) (page 89), presented opposite Mikulov in the book.
In Self Portrait with Mikulov, Tomanova has removed her father’s green sweater, perhaps itself the mantle of a difficult childhood and of loss, confusion, and confliction, and stepped nude—bare, without anything behind which to hide—in front of the camera into the picture frame, again against the background of Mikulov Castle and Holy Hill. Unlike Self Portrait with Mikulov (Hometown), there is a visible self-assurance and even a sense of ownership, an attitude that can also be seen in Self Portrait (Yellow Glove) (2018) (page 92). Odyssean, Tomanova has returned home. Read as a pendant pair, Mikulov and Self Portrait with Mikulov form an easy binary of non-presence and presence that reflects the situation of Tomanova’s time away from home and her return. But in a more elaborate way, particularly when Self Portrait with Mikulov (Hometown) is included as a part of this series, there is a narrative about the process of coming to terms with a past and a present deeply bound to notions of identity and place.
This perhaps somewhat murky process of coming to terms with identity and place, particularly a place as fundamental as the childhood home, is one that swings wildly between the self-confidence of the triumphal return as a self-made artist and the conflicted self, revisiting emotionally charged rooms filled with memories. Back in the places in which she grew up, Tomanova confronts the memories of those spaces and reverberations of that past. My Hair, My Sister’s Hair (2019) (fig. 9) shows the rediscovery of locks of Tomanova’s childhood hair in a drawer, a visceral connection to a past and a presence. While she has been away for over eight years, part of her has continued to occupy the space of home, not only as a disembodied presence on the telephone, or in possessions still left in the home, but corporeally. That bodily connection to the space of the home is one that can also be read through the lens of still-life as a more conceptual self-portraiture; the blonde locks and discarded glasses faintly outline a past identity.
The memory of past self is made more immediate in images such as School Project (Mom and Me) (2019) (page 37) and Family Picture c. 1997 (2018) (fig. 10). In these images, Tomanova acknowledges and presents a record of her family past. School Project is a photograph of an undated school project in which Tomanova had affixed on grid paper and neatly labelled two pictures of herself and one of her mother. Taken with flash against a dark background, this photograph of pictures of a young self and parent recedes in its immediacy, the reflected light from the flash creating blown-out areas, silver, white, reflective, in an almost ghostly image of family, of memory. Taken on the first day of the new year, it is an excavation into the memory of self, of past that, like Bedroom, introduces an uncanny element of opacity.
Family Picture c. 1997 provides another window for Tomanova into her past as a way to revisit it, to remember it, to represent it, perhaps to even come to terms with it—to reimage it. Family Picture c. 1997 is a photograph of a family photograph taken during a birthday celebration before the family unit would be ruptured a few short years later by her father passing, resulting in her mother moving to Austria and Tomanova beginning to live with one of her sisters. Tomanova, with short hair, stands in front of her father, next to her sister and mother. Her father had just cut Tomanova’s hair short—the missing locks are the ones in My Hair, My Sister’s Hair. To look closely at the family portrait in Family Picture c. 1997 is to see a moment of complex family dynamics—mother holds a gift and looks up and to the right outside of the picture frame; middle sister Kamila’s wide smile almost conceals her closed eyes; father, partially hidden in the back before an open door leading to dark space, glances askance to the left; and only Tomanova looks directly at the camera, behind which is her eldest sister, Bara, whose birthday was being celebrated. In Family Picture c. 1997 the family portrait is tilted, perhaps indicating the wavering uncertainty of that family life, a premise that bears itself out in the family history that was altered not only by her father’s death and the upheaval that arose from that event, but also by a difficult home life.
In It Was Once My Universe Tomanova addresses that gap, that space, that period of time in between her leaving for the United States in 2011 and her return home in 2018. Mom and Grandma (Marie and Marie) (2019) (page 103) is fundamentally a photograph of a photograph of Tomanova’s mother and grandmother, who had come to live in the family house and died while Tomanova was away and unable to return for the funeral. The image is paired in the book with My Old Clothes, My Old Room (2019) (page 102), a portrait of Tomanova in her childhood room wearing one of her old favorite shirts, standing in front of an armoire of her things. Together these images create a family panorama of three generations of Maries, connecting Tomanova to her past and her absence. The notion of presence and absence is a powerful aspect of It Was Once My Universe. Grandma’s Belongings (2019) (page 26) is an image related to Mom and Grandma (Marie and Marie), but the focus of the photograph is now the open box containing a color passport photograph of her grandmother and her grandmother’s two lipsticks. In this photograph, Tomanova has honed in on some sort of essence of her grandmother and her absence, leaving behind these few precious indicators of her daily life.
This tension between presence and absence occurs again and again in It Was Once My Universe, as Tomanova works through the spaces of her home. She collapses past and present in images such as My Old Clothes, My Old Room, where clothes and bedroom are crucial signifiers of self-identity, particularly for a young person, and in Mouse Nest (My Precious Things) (2019) (page 99), an image of an empty suitcase in which Tomanova had placed her most treasured clothes in 2011 before she left home for the United States, only to find them completely destroyed by mice upon her return. These images, like Mom and Grandma (Marie and Marie) and Grandma’s Belongings offer an engagement, or link between past and present that emphasize not only those points, but also the space between.
The space between seems emblematized in It Was Once My Universe through landscape imagery, such as Way to School (2018) (fig. 11), which is a photograph of a place that Tomanova passed daily walking to school as a teenager. It is a photograph of a space that projects multiple qualities that collide. It feels quaint, perhaps a little menacing, and maybe even enchanted. It feels rural, and yet it could be urban. At the center of the image is a large building in the distance, factory-like, at odds with the dense shrubbery and the two eighteenth- or nineteenth-century structures at either side of the photograph. The light is indistinct too, and it is hard to determine time of day, dawn or dusk. The ground sparkles with broken glass and stones. It is difficult to read this image.
Scattered throughout It Was Once My Universe are other landscapes that exhibit a similar in-betweenness, such as Almost New Year (2018) (page 29), On the Holy Hill (2019) (page 35), Untitled (Train) (2019) (page 43), and Fields(2018) (page 111). The smoke from the fireworks in Almost New Year is like the snow in On the Holy Hill, Untitled (Train), and Fields. It is spectral. While the photographs are very direct, a distinct marker of Tomanova’s matter-of-fact style, there is something that disarms, ever so subtly. The streaks of light from the fireworks are mimicked by tree branches against the night sky in Almost New Year; a single bird, black, flies in the gray sky and amongst the snowflakes in On the Holy Hill; the blur and colors and pattern of leaves on the trees make it difficult to tell whether or not a reflection of the photographer is superimposed on the landscape in Untitled (Train); and the swelling landscape gives an impression of twisting and yet also seems flat, as blurred foreground meets crisp midground before receding into background with its overcast sky in Fields.
Still-life images test and reveal the reality of being home. As Tomanova experiences her return home, it is almost as if she wants to touch everything around her, those things that are immediate and prove to be concrete, as can be seen in photographs such as Living Room (2018) (page 20), Bread (2018) (page 23), and Apples on Steps (2018) (page 82). The material experience of the home—of the bread from the daily breakfast with its butter, of the sheepskin on the bench in the living room and the apples that are directly from the family farm and linked to Tomanova’s childhood—is conveyed by Tomanova in these images, in her experience, immediate and durable, in those things that are just always there, routine and unremarkable, but missed deeply when gone or from which one is so long absent.
This durable material reality of the home and the dizzying experience of its reexperience is reflected acutely in an image such as Willy with Horses (2018) (page 17). The photograph is almost animated with a shallow breath and movement, yet it is entirely quotidian, abstractly evoking Hesiod’s Works and Days, or the painting tradition of seasons or times of day. In Willy with Horses there is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), enacting those daily rhythms tied to space, place, and landscape, rhythms tied to self and home, tied to the weather, to calm and storm, to exaltation and reflection, to joy and sorrow, to having and longing. There is magic here in the everyday, the snow, the sunrise, the family, the things and people gathered together, the loss, the absence, the presence, and the reexperience—the possibility of reexperience, the ability to finally go home. In Sphinxes (2019) (page 33), a photograph taken in Valtice where Tomanova was born, is that enchanted land of the past brought into the present of the photograph as Tomanova confronts and struggles to reconcile her divergent selves—multiple bodies of self, not always past and not entirely present—in her return home. The sphinxes, composite creatures, symbolic perhaps of that multiplicity of self, that hybridity, guard a forest at night against an unearthly purplish-blue sky. The last image of It Was Once My Universeis Was It Just a Dream? It shows two horses tethered outside of the house at night as snow falls, looking away from the camera and perhaps, figuratively, backward into the past; a fitting end for a body of work that almost vibrates, expanding and contracting to reflect deeply on feeling and memory that are always in the moment that is the photograph.
[1] Hannah Abel-Hirsch, “Marie Tomanova’s Photographs Are Excavations of Identity, Her Own and Others,” British Journal of Photography, 13 November 2020, https://www.1854.photography/2020/11/marie-tomanovas-photographs-are-excavations-of-identity/.
[2] Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 58.