Marrie Bot Photographer Concerned Photography

Marrie Bot (1946)
Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 1990

Marrie Bot received the prize for a coherent oeuvre of high quality which also reflects new developments. In addition to her photo books, Marrie Bot is also working on a continuing photographic series on people in their everyday setting, under the title Hanging Around. Her photographic projects and books testify to a very intense and honest involvement with aspects of social reality which tend to be overlooked. Marrie Bot's work exhibits a symbiosis of vision and commitment which will leave few people unmoved. Her work provides vivid proof of the fact that remarkable results can still be achieved in the field of concerned photography.

Both Miserere (documentary photography) and The Burden of Existence (company photography) were privately published by the author, who also wrote the text and designed the books, producing combined projects in which visual and textual elements form an inextricable whole.

Marrie Bot's work, unlike that of many other photographers, cannot be captured in a single representative image. Her photos reinforce each other in the way they interconnect and the text plays an essential supporting role. Through her long-term preoccupation with a single subject, combined with her extremely conscientious approach and professional passion, each of Marrie Bot's photographic projects deepens our vision of an underexposed aspect of society. Her photographs do not merely document the existing situation but, by virtue of the texts she has written, they present a definite and nuanced view of it. Marrie Bot has been quietly working for years on subsequent photographic projects. The jury is fully confident that these projects will also achieve new heights of artistry and content. They will give new meaning at a high and professional level to the depth and thereby the development of documentational photography in the Netherlands. This satisfied the second criterion for the award of the prize: the perspective of new developments. Read more ...