A Winter Journey is a small photo book by the Czech painter and photographer Jan Jedlička, and the first volume of the book edition that ECM began in 1996. It reproduces a single black-and-white film shot on a train from Basel to The Hague, frame after frame, without selection. ECM listeners already know one of its images, since the last frame became the cover of Jan Garbarek's Visible World.
Jedlička was born in Prague in 1944 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there from 1962 to 1968. In 1969 he emigrated to Switzerland and settled in Zurich, and since the 1990s he has also lived in Prague. From the late 1970s he worked regularly in the Maremma in southern Tuscany, painting with pigments he makes from local minerals, clay, sand and dust. He met Manfred Eicher in the late 1980s, and his first ECM cover followed in 1992, for a New Series disc of viola concertos by Alfred Schnittke and Giya Kancheli. Later his drawings and photographs accompanied András Schiff's recordings of Janáček, Beethoven and Bach.
The photographs were taken between 5 and 8 February 1995 with a Nikon autofocus camera loaded with black-and-white film. During the journey Jedlička was reading Vilém Flusser's writing on photography. The pictures follow one another in the order they were taken, and nothing has been removed or reframed, so the book shows a whole roll as the camera recorded it. The sequence ends with three pictures taken on the shore, the last of them the image Garbarek's album later carried.
Writing for the Prague City Gallery magazine Qartal, the critic Pavel Klusák calls the book "a single exposed film from start to finish without any intervention by the author". He reads it as a polemic with Flusser and as a test that Jedlička's way of seeing passes, since it survives even when he shoots by instinct. In 2021 the Prague City Gallery held the first comprehensive exhibition of Jedlička's work. Its curator, Jitka Hlaváčková, singled out this photo essay about a train journey as a project different in kind from his long landscape cycles.
The book has 56 pages, card covers and stitch binding, and was published by ECM in 1996 as ECM New Series Book Edition/1.
