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Anna Mikuskova
Anna Mikušková Anna Mikušková grew up in the Czech Republic and now splits her time between Czech Republic and Alaska. She received an MA in English language and literature from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic and an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the Rochester Institute of Technology in NY. For six years, she apprenticed silver gelatin printing with master printer Paul Caponigro. Before turning to visual art, Mikušková worked in the field of human rights focusing on services for immigrants and refugees. Her work frequently turns to themes of home, belonging, and the relationships we form with the environments we inhabit.
Her photographs and artist books have been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts and the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. Her work is held in private and public collections in the United States and in the Czech Republic including the Wallace Library of the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Art Gallery of the University of New England. In 2022, she was included in the 2022 Silver List.
I first got the idea to spend an extended time in Alaska six or seven years ago when I was searching the Internet and stumbled upon a help wanted ad looking for summer employees in a remote hotel near the North Pole. I filled in the application, wrote a cover letter and then put it aside. The timing was not right. I had just started a full time position and my photography was at the very beginning. I knew that the gap between the images I was taking and the ones I wanted to take was vast.
Or perhaps my Alaskan project started even earlier when I first moved to Maine in 2005 and discovered a penchant for remote areas, small pockets of civilization tucked away in a landscape, scarcely populated towns in Northern woods or remote islands off the coast accessible only once a day by mail-boat. Coming from the cities of Central Europe, I was fascinated by the ties of the community to nature, weather, seasons and how they permeated daily life. At the same time, I felt oddly at home, won over by the combination of natural beauty, tight-knit community and the faintest presence of nostalgia perhaps coming from the harshness of making a living at the end of the world. And it was the rocky Maine coastline and forested mountains that beckoned me to pick up the camera and become a photographer.
My dream of spending several months in Alaska rose anew last year when I was in between permanent job positions and with a free summer ahead. In my search for the right place I focused on remote areas, small towns off the beaten path, away from cruise ships, souvenir shops and busy hotels, but with a community large enough that they needed a helper they could put up for the summer. I scanned job positions, sent letters and had interviews. From the beginning, one place stood out: McCarthy. Nestled in the mountains of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, McCarthy is a small town but rich in history and natural beauty. The town is reachable only by a bush plane or after an eight-hour car ride from Anchorage. The last sixty miles follow an unpaved gravel road that winds its way through the mountains, across a narrow bridge high above the Kuskulana river and past signs that warn drivers to “proceed at their own risk.” The road ends with a footbridge that non-residents cross on feet to walk the couple miles to Main Street, a dirt road pocketed with potholes and puddles.