Dec
20
Last summer I was sitting at the swimming pool to keep an eye on my kids when I spotted these two teenagers. The girl was about 15 years old and she obviously had grown real fast lately. Her arms and legs were long and skinny and she was having trouble to figure out what to do with them. It was clear she was in love but had no idea how to handle this “new” feeling. I was really moved by her appareance and it was fascinating to witness her growing but still shaky self-consciousness.
This fascination with adolescents in search of their identity I also found in the photo’s of Rineke Dijkstra. Especially her magisterial series of Beach Portraits: austere, frontal shots of young people on beaches in the US, The Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Gabon and the Ukraine. She concentrated on the moment that a pose just begins to form, or is just being abandoned. Hesitancy and uncertainty are visible and refer to the existential loneliness of adolescents.
Rineke Dijkstra tends to work in series, concentrating on individual portraits. She focuses on people in a transitional stage of their life, such as these adolescents and pre-adolescents on the beach in her ‘Beach’ series or women after giving birth in ‘Mothers’, and new recruits in ‘Israeli Soldiers’. Her subjects stand facing the camera against a minimal background and it’s this simplicity which encourages us to direct all our attention towards the isolated person and leaves us moved and a bit uncomfortable by witnessing their vulnerability.
Website: rinekedijkstra.net
Dec
01
Ten friends having a meal on ten consecutive days in field in the Dutch countryside. Each day the friends, the tables and the food were shifted closer to the horizon. The photographs of the ten meals were assembled into a single image of a large party. Each friend appears ten times in the photograph, each time in a different outfit. The colours are carefully balanced: the outfits in the background are more brightly coloured than those in the foreground so that they attract equal attention and because of the expanse of blue sky there are no blue outfits.
Hundred different tailors in Beijing made their outfits, not because this made the outfits more affordable but to show that the real world is at least ten times larger that that of the friends in the field. Each of us in the West is probably connected with thousands of Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Indonesian and Indian workers through the products with which we fill our lives.
By being multiplied by ten, each person in the photograph has been rendered an anonymous figure. However, the magazine ‘Ten To One’ introduces us personally to the hundred tailors behind the outfits. A hundred shop fronts, workshops, outfits and tailors were photographed. Even the labels sewn into the outfits and the sales receipts are given a place in the magazine.
It made me wonder how many people are there in my closet …
Artists: Zijlmans & Jongenelis
Website: www.tentoone.nl
Nov
10
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Words: Haruki Murakami (from Kafka on the Shore)
Art: Ori Gersht
Aug
15
They say that just before you enter heaven you’ll see your life pass before your eyes. Usually imagined as a fast-forward flip book of sentimental still images: birth, parents, school, holiday, first girlfriend, first sex, job, wife, kids, etc. and all the little things in between, summating a totality of meagre existence in a split second flash.
Yeondoo Jung, however, is a man who likes to take a bit of time with things, savour every precious moment, sit back and enjoy the ride.
Documentary Nostalgia is a one-take one-chance-only performance shot in real time. No stops, no pauses. This is Jung’s magnificent autobiography. Birthday party clown tricks, slapstick humour, cartoon exaggeration, and the clumsy ’special effects’ of silent movie cliche; Jung draws from all the low-fi mysteries of childhood delight to reconstruct his own reality.
Not as it was, but as he prefers to remember it, a make-shift mythology in its conception, wide-eyed, innocent, and confounding.
He offers the possibility of not one existence, but many: to be urban and rural, contemporary or ancient, Eastern or Western, to be anywhere or anything at all. Everyone can do this simply by daring to dream.
www.yeondoojung.com
Jun
10
I met a lot of interesting, talented and funny people lately. They are located in different countries all over the world. We follow each other’s activities, we share dreams and thoughts, we make plans and we even party together …….
And it’s all happening in a virtual world.
I never expected to find myself chatting with complete “strangers” but here I am. And I’m truly enjoying it. Only together with these new friends a new problem has entered my life. Not being used to the virtual existence I’m getting frustrated by the inability of actually getting together. Thinking about that it occurred to me that it could easily happen that I ran across one of my virtual friends without knowing.
It could be one of these.
Simon Høgsberg captured 178 people over 20 days standing from the same spot on a railroad bridge in Berlin. Then he put the photos together in what could be the world’s largest panorama (100 meters, yes meters, wide!).
website: www.simonhoegsberg.com
Jun
02
When I was in high school there was this group of kids whom I considered to be really cool and I desperately wanted to join this group. So I asked my parents for the same (expensive) sneakers they wore convinced that would do the trick. My mum then bought me the cheap fakes, which off course were very wrong and obviously I never made it to the cool kids.
So I started to present myself as as a “not wanting to wear ridiculously expensive sneakers original person” and joined another group. Like most people I was looking for a common language to express my individuality… by dressing alike
It’s this universal human desire to conform that’s led to Exactitudes
Photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have traveled the world to identify and document modern tribes, focusing on groups as diverse as Brazilian beach honeys in matching bikinis and Dutch grannies in identical beige raincoats. Whether the catalyst to fit in is created by class, gender, rebellion or other faces of identity, each individual subject in a series is posed and shot exactly the same as the others. When placed together in groups, it’s the ubiquitous style code that’s immediately apparent.
Note: looking at Exactitudes may cost you a lot of (fun) time.
Apr
29
I once met someone who collected old family portraits because he felt sorry for the people in it. He thought that they would be very sad knowing they ended up in a garbage can because nobody cared anymore, so he made it his task to save them.
It was a wonderful story and the same feeling came right back to me when I saw the work of Anthony Goicolea.
Inspired by old studio portraits of his long-dead relatives, he reproduced them in pencil as if they were negatives, and then photographed them as missing-person posters – appended to streetlights, trees and buildings.
The result is a series where I find, in Goicolea’s words, “the strange sense of nostalgia for something I have never been a part of or experienced directly.”
Website: www.anthonygoicolea.com
Apr
18
Combining the silence of Edward Muybridge’s pictures with the association-rich composition of a still life, Martin Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation. And it’s this moment of transformation that provides for us something that we normally cannot see. It is an in-between state where rest and motion can exist together.
Website: www.martin-klimas.de
Apr
15
Ruud van Empel used to design, among other things, the sets for the wacky misadventures of my absolute favorite Dutch television series for kids called Theo & Thea. I was still in art school back then, studying scenography, and he was one of my inspirators. So at first when I heard of his decision in to turn his back on film and television because of his irritation about its growing commercialization I was truly disappointed.
Until I laid eyes on his digital photo collages and found they absolutely justified his decision. He still cuts, glues and manipulates to create new worlds only now using a computer as his paintbrush and not limited in any way anymore, the results are astonishing.
His photos may look quite realistic, but what they represent has in fact never existed. They are creations, subtly and meticulously composed by combining as many as 100 images into a single scene and almost too perfect to be true, every detail, every color is sublimated.
But you only have to look a little bit closer to at all that perfect greener-than-green scenery to know that there is something malicious lurking beneath the surface, a nameless, indefinable threat, but nonetheless present everywhere. A feeling of disquiet crawls under your skin and will remain with you for quite a while.
Website: www.ruudvanempel.nl
Show: gallery Terra in Tokio, Japan, April 18 – May 23, 2009
Apr
07
A couple of weeks ago I read an article about albinism in Africa. Albinism is a congenital disorder that affects skin pigmentation. In most African countries it can lead to expulsion and discrimination. Albinism is referred to as ‘sope’, meaning something magical inhabited by powerful evil spirits; albinos sometimes are even hunted for their body parts, which are supposed to be useful for curing various diseases.
It made me wonder whether this could all be filed under lack of education as the article lets us believe. Or, could it be the case that we share collective prejudices only slightly curbed by education? What can we do about our own prejudices, then?
Pieter Hugo confronts us with these prejudices as we look at his frontal portraits. Here we see what we usually choose to look at from the corners of our eyes. His series: Looking Aside (2003/2005) not only questions why we are so awkward when we encounter people who are unusual in some way but at the same time also force us to think about the meaning of ‘black’ and ‘white’.
Website: www.pieterhugo.com
