Hanno Hardt, Slovenians: Footprints of the Past

Hanno Hardt (1934–2011) was an internationally recognised media theorist, a world-renowned communication scholar and a dedicated photographer. Born in Germany, he spent most of his life working in the United States, Germany and Slovenia.

For many years, he served as a professor of communication at the University of Iowa (USA), where he made a significant contribution to the formation of critical approaches to media studies. After retiring in 2002, he continued his academic career at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana. An enthusiastic photographer, he left several cycles of documentary photographs that he had created in the countries where he lived or visited. Hanno Hardt understood photography as a key element of cultural and political life, contributing to the creation of 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 central to his photographs. He loved to photograph scenes from city life, especially more populated quarters, often playing with the inscriptions on people’s T-shirts or with graffiti, thus adding the otherwise often absent element of text to his photography. Most of his photographs are sparsely documented, with the only information being the temporal dimension, illustrated by the year in which the image was taken. Hanno Hardt was also attracted by large advertising billboards, which he understood as the intrusion of crude capitalism into profane landscapes, as this type of advertising was still foreign at the time. In February 2024, Dr Vida Zei donated her husband’s precious negatives, stored in 23 folders containing an estimated 60,000 images, to the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia.

Hanno Hardt was known for his long-term documentary-photographic projects focused on everyday life: in Ireland, the USA, the former East Germany, Croatia, Serbia, Italy and Slovenia. He photographed the Ljubljana market for ten years (from 1984 to 1994) and was engaged in documenting the reading process (from 1990 to 2011). His project entitled Slovenians (1991–2008), in which he captured two decades of Slovenian transition in images, also represents an outstanding body of work. It is this project that has been developed into the photography exhibition Hanno Hardt, Slovenians: Footprints of the Past. Created under the auspices of the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia, the exhibition has been prepared by Katarina Jurjavčič and will be on display in the “S” Gallery at the Ljubljana Castle from 12 February 2026.

Exhibition curator: Katarina Jurjavčič

The exhibition has been prepared in collaboration with:

Changing money at the market, Ljubljana, 1992, from the series Slovenians. ©MNSZS. Photograph: Hanno Hardt. The photograph is copyrighted.

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Friends, Prule, Ljubljana, 1996, from the series Slovenians. ©MNSZS. Photograph: Hanno Hardt. The photograph is copyrighted.

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Scene from the streets of Ljubljana. Mourning, Miklošičeva ulica, Ljubljana, 1998, from the series Slovenians. ©MNSZS. Photograph: Hanno Hardt. The photograph is copyrighted.

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Scene from the streets of Ljubljana. A carefree childhood on the banks of the Ljubljanica River, 1998, from the series Slovenians. ©MNSZS. Photograph: Hanno Hardt. The photograph is copyrighted.

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Independent Slovenia, the intersection of Dunajska ulica and Slovenska ulica, Ljubljana, 1992, from the series Slovenians. ©MNSZS. Photograph: Hanno Hardt. The photograph is copyrighted.

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Independent Slovenia, Čopova ulica, Ljubljana, 1992, from the series Slovenians. ©MNSZS. Photograph: Hanno Hardt. The photograph is copyrighted.

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