Hannah Kozak
Hannah Kozak
he threw the last punch too hard
Hardcover
700 Copies
8” x 10.5”
Published by FotoEvidence
2020
About the Book:
When photographer and former Hollywood stunt woman Hannah Kozak was 9 years old, her mother left Hannah, her four siblings and Hannah’s father to be with another man who turned out to be violent. One day, Hannah witnessed him beating her mother so badly she sustained permanent brain damage and had to be moved to an assisted living facility.
For nearly 40 years (she is now 82) she has lived in two facilities.
Hannah had fond, early memories of her mother as a vivacious, beautiful women who loved to sing and dance, but she harbored anger towards her mother for abandoning her, and hardly saw her for nearly 30 years.
In 2004 Hannah had a spiritual epiphany after breaking both her feet in a stunt accident. "I realized when I couldn't walk and was crying in my bedroom, I needed to forgive myself for judging my mother for leaving." From 2009 to 2019, Hannah visited her mother to make the tender and powerful photographs presented in this book. Through her photography, she was able to process her feelings towards a person that she had never truly known. Over time, Hannah grew to love her mother and discover the power of forgiveness
Book review by Dana Stirling |
If there was ever a book to get you to feel every feeling in the book, this one will do that to you.
I first came to this book pretty angry over the subject matter, I felt angry for the artist and angry that a family had to go through so much pain, violence and heartache. I know this feeling isn’t rational, as it is not my life, so I don’t really have the right to feel that, but that was the head space I went into when starting to look at the book. The book title itself was enough to both captivate my attention and get me feeling everything at once.
Once you open the book you first encounter the scans of old family albums. The instant feeling of nostalgia, memories, sadness, and joy all come up with the familiarity of these old, tainted familiar pages. You can almost smell the dust in the pages, the old glue and the silver from these images. In the very first page, in the very first page and photo, there is a woman in a dress and the caption [which is a new addition, one that the artists added] reads “My mother in Guatemala City, eighteen years old. I wonder if she could have imagined what her future would hold”. This sentence, so simple yet gut ranching. This sentiment is so powerful coming from a family member and a daughter. This sentence, I think, really talks to the overall feeling this book will carry.
Once you pass the album pages, you encounter the current, future reality of these people from the previous pages. We first get to meet Hannah’s mother. The first images are not easy, they are raw and painful and it is almost shocking to have them at the beginning, but I think it is because this work is not apologetic, it is not hiding – it is true, painfully and beautifully all at once.
The book has text along the way, and it helps not only give more context to the images and what is happening in their lives now, but it gives an inside look into Hannah’s thoughts, feelings and experience. The text doesn’t come to illustrate but it comes as a diary entry, you feel as if you are reading her mind, her memories, her fears, and emotions. It almost feels wrong to be a part of it as it is so honest and private.
In the book, there are also many juxtapositions of Hannah’s mother and her career as a stuntwoman. The presence of violence, even if very different from one another, is interesting and makes you really think about what it means to be alive, what it means to be around other people and how things you grow up with, are near you can shape who you are.
In “Self-portrait Polaroid with burn” [page 59] Hannah writes
“…My self-portraits are a search for self-knowledge that provide me with a coherent sense of self and are the mirror I never had from my mother. Our relationship was derailed so early in my life. My early mothering experiences were associated with unavailability, loss and rejection.
Photography has reworked this relationship and it’s the only arena where I can express my conflicts in the separation of our relationship and use my heart to rework who we can be to each other.”
Her words here really stayed with me because I could relate on so many levels to this statement and this relationship to photography and I wanted you all to share it as well.
The book ends with a photograph of her mother and a short text where she asks her “What do you want more than anything in the whole world” and she replies, “That everyone love each other”, and right after a card she received from her second husband, an old photo of her back in Guatemala and ends with a drawing by her grandmother of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala. And in the caption of the photo “Lake Atitlán has been my escape from the world for many years. Finding this drawing by my grandmother Carmen showed me that it touched her as well.”
I found this ending to the book to have a real sense of poetic ending that is full of life and forgiveness. The book really comes a full circle and has a feeling that the artist has been through grief, anger, sadness but also found love and compassion within all of this.
This book is a great read and an important one as well. I highly recommend you add it to your book library and support it. Get a copy by clicking the link below.
