Eva Besnyö Zeeland toen Photography

Eva Besnyo: Zeeland Toen. Amsterdam: Drukkerij Mart, 1990. [Text by Jacqueline Louwerse; published in Dutch; paperback, 60 pages, 23 cm., 35/40]

The Big Flood of 1953 photographed

During the night of 31 January 1953, a flood disaster hit the South-west of the Netherlands. About 1850 people and tens of thousands of animals lost their lives. Around 100,000 people had to be evacuated, 4500 buildings were destroyed and many more were damaged. Almost 200,000 hectares of land were flooded. Nine months later the last hole in the dike was closed.

Of the numerous floods that have swept the Netherlands, this was the first one to be documented photographically on a large scale. Journalists, photographers and filmmakers travelled to the disaster area in large numbers. For this website all photographs made in February 1953 of the flood disaster by Dolf Kruger, Ed van der Elsken, Aart Klein, Kees Molkenboer, Cas Oorthuys and Ed van Wijk have been scanned.

The Nederlands fotomuseum (Netherlands Museum for Photography) aims at making Dutch photography and its history easily accessible and at furthering people’s interest in this cultural heritage.

Eva Besnyö Zeeland toen Photography

Eva Besnyo: Zeeland Toen. Amsterdam: Drukkerij Mart, 1990. [Text by Jacqueline Louwerse; published in Dutch; paperback, 60 pages, 23 cm., 35/40]

The Big Flood of 1953 photographed

During the night of 31 January 1953, a flood disaster hit the South-west of the Netherlands. About 1850 people and tens of thousands of animals lost their lives. Around 100,000 people had to be evacuated, 4500 buildings were destroyed and many more were damaged. Almost 200,000 hectares of land were flooded. Nine months later the last hole in the dike was closed.

Of the numerous floods that have swept the Netherlands, this was the first one to be documented photographically on a large scale. Journalists, photographers and filmmakers travelled to the disaster area in large numbers. For this website all photographs made in February 1953 of the flood disaster by Dolf Kruger, Ed van der Elsken, Aart Klein, Kees Molkenboer, Cas Oorthuys and Ed van Wijk have been scanned.

The Nederlands fotomuseum (Netherlands Museum for Photography) aims at making Dutch photography and its history easily accessible and at furthering people’s interest in this cultural heritage.

Street culture New York Ari Marcopoulos Photography

This spring Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam presents an exhibition by the Amsterdam-born photographer and filmmaker, Ari Marcopoulos. Marcopoulos (b. 1957, Amsterdam) set off for New York in 1979 and quickly became a significant documenter of alternative youth culture in America throughout the last three decades. Foam is showing work from his entire oeuvre, ranging from photos of the emerging hip-hop and downtown art scene in New York in the 1980s and the snowboard and skate culture in the 1990s, to frequent depictions of his own family in Northern California over the last ten years.

Marcopoulos’s work is characterized by a remarkable feeling of intimacy. Whether it concerns celebrities from the world of music or art, or his own family, he approaches his subjects in an intuitive manner and he always knows how to get close to the heart. His photos are direct, extremely personal and subtly structured. Recurrent themes are art, music, graffiti and the vulnerability of the human body. The exhibition shows a cross-section of his work from the last 30 years, varying from grainy black and white copies, monumental colour photos, videos, books and zines.

Upon arriving in New York, self-taught Marcopoulos had the opportunity to learn the profession from two great, but very different masters. He started out as a darkroom printer for Andy Warhol, from whom he learned that anything is worth photographing. Marcopoulos also worked as an assistant to photographer Irving Penn, from whom he gained more technical skill and learned that control and a simple approach produce the best images.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Marcopoulos began to photograph street culture in New York, which at the time was characterized by an emerging graffiti and hip-hop scene. As is evidenced throughout his entire oeuvre, Marcopoulos has the ability to assimilate into the group he’s following, by which he seems to stay ahead of the Zeitgeist. His earlier work contains portraits of personalities that later emerged as the leading players of their time, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe and rappers like Rakim, LL Cool J or Run DMC.

In the 1990s, Marcopoulos became interested in the lives of skateboarders. He befriended a group of young skaters who were recruited for the film Kids by Larry Clark in 1995. Marcopoulos followed them on a bicycle and documented them both as a group and in their personal lives. An assignment for a snowboard company introduced Marcopoulos to a new youth culture of snowboarders. In documenting these groups, he combined images of extreme physical exertion and concentration with intimate images of their daily lives.

After his marriage, Marcopoulos moved to the West Coast, where he became the father of two sons, Cairo and Ethan, who frequently appear in his photos. The themes from his earlier years return in photographs of his children growing up, such as skateboarding, graffiti and music.

Ari Marcopoulos became acquainted with photography at an early age, when he received an SLR camera as a gift from his father. After living in New York for a long time, for the last few years he has resided in northern California. Marcopoulos has exhibited his work in Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, NY (2000), Deitch Project NY, The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2002), MOMA (2005), MU Eindhoven (2006), Gallery White Room, Tokyo (2008), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA (2009), amongst others.

Several books of Marcopoulos’ work have been published, including Transitions and Exits, New York powerHouse Books (2001), Release your inner Ari, self-published (2006), Free Fall, Paris Nuke (2007), The Chance is Higher, New York Dashwood Books (2008), Within Arm’s Reach, JRP Ringier (2009).

(Shopping) Mall Walkers Peter Tijhuis Photography

Peter Tijhuis Photography ... & lees verder ...

Ghosts of Shopping Past

Interview by Nozlee Samadzadeh

Landscaping overgrows, walls develop mildew, ceilings cave in—a building can be shut down, but that doesn’t make it go away. Brian Ulrich’s photographs of closed-down malls and big-box retail stores reveal the potential ghost towns lying inside successful shopping complexes all across America.

Unemployment & Society in the Netherlands 1975 1990 & in the USA today Photojournalism Photography

Photography Bert Nienhuis, Han Singels, Gon Buurman

Werk(loosheid) en samenleving. Een fotografische visie over de periode 1975-1990

Bunnik Landelijke Stuurgroep Sociaal Kulturele Aktiviteiten voor Werklozen 1990. Orig. photo dec. wrappers, illustr. b/w photographs, 59 p. Soft Cover 27,5x27 cm

MEER, HANS VAN DER - HAVEMAN, MARIËTTE (ED.). - Werk: Produktiebedrijven gefotografeerd.

Amsterdam, Boekhandel De Verbeelding, 1993. Illustrated wrappers over soft boards (softcover), 20,2 x 21 cms., (4), 84 pp., 81 phot. plates in black-and-white, printed at Steendrukkerij De Jong, Hilversum. ISBN: 9074159060

Ineke Heising, Ernst Hellemink, Hans Booms (eds)
Werk/Work. De Randstad fotocollectie. The Randstad Collection of Photographs 1988-1995
Randstad, Amsterdam 1995 Large sq. 4to, hb, spiralled binding, photographs from Hans Aarsman, Taco Anema, Paul de Nooijer, Erwin Olaf, Cas Oorthuys, Hannes Wallrafen, Eva Besnyö, Koos Breukel, Rineke Dijkstra, Cor Jaring, Aart Klein, Philip Mechanicus, Hans van der Meer, Dolf Kruger a.o.

The picture of an armed officer of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department by Anthony Suau as World Press Photo of the Year 2008 ...

Unemployment & Society in the Netherlands 1975 1990 & in the USA today Photojournalism Photography

Photography Bert Nienhuis, Han Singels, Gon Buurman

Werk(loosheid) en samenleving. Een fotografische visie over de periode 1975-1990

Bunnik Landelijke Stuurgroep Sociaal Kulturele Aktiviteiten voor Werklozen 1990. Orig. photo dec. wrappers, illustr. b/w photographs, 59 p. Soft Cover 27,5x27 cm

MEER, HANS VAN DER - HAVEMAN, MARIËTTE (ED.). - Werk: Produktiebedrijven gefotografeerd.

Amsterdam, Boekhandel De Verbeelding, 1993. Illustrated wrappers over soft boards (softcover), 20,2 x 21 cms., (4), 84 pp., 81 phot. plates in black-and-white, printed at Steendrukkerij De Jong, Hilversum. ISBN: 9074159060

Ineke Heising, Ernst Hellemink, Hans Booms (eds)
Werk/Work. De Randstad fotocollectie. The Randstad Collection of Photographs 1988-1995
Randstad, Amsterdam 1995 Large sq. 4to, hb, spiralled binding, photographs from Hans Aarsman, Taco Anema, Paul de Nooijer, Erwin Olaf, Cas Oorthuys, Hannes Wallrafen, Eva Besnyö, Koos Breukel, Rineke Dijkstra, Cor Jaring, Aart Klein, Philip Mechanicus, Hans van der Meer, Dolf Kruger a.o.

The picture of an armed officer of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department by Anthony Suau as World Press Photo of the Year 2008 ...

Reissue Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels William Klein’s iconic photobook Photography

An essential item for everyone with an interest in photography, William Klein’s Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels was reissued by New York publishing house Errata Editions. With 160 pages and 120 duotone illustrations, the book will be released on February 28th, more than half a century after its first publishing, in 1956.

William Klein was born in 1928 into a poor Jewish family in New York City. Klein studied Sociology, joined the U.S. Army and, upon discharge, decided to settle in France. Taught by artist Fernand Léger, Klein became a fairly successful painter before switching his craft to photography, albeit having no formal training. The artist achieved far-reaching fame for his fashion photography and photojournalism work, often characterized by the use of natural lightning and equipment that was rarely used in fashion photography, such as wide-angle and telephoto lenses.

Broadway and 103rd St., New York (1955) ( from ... This picture is part of a collection which marked an important turning point in the history of photography in the second half of the 20th century. This collection was published in 1956 under the title “New York”. WILLIAM KLEIN, who at the time was living and working in Paris, returned to the city where he was born and with this collection about its street life turned the photographic genre on its head. Using a high-speed and therefore grainier film he introduced picture distortion and blurring without any hesitation. His compositions, complex and apparently without order, set them apart from existing canons. It resulted in an uncomfortable and crude photography that probably wanted to reflect the sensations that the city and the American way of life produced in him. A photography full of rage and a new way to express itself. The author himself commented with fine irony on his own technique, saying that it was “a crash course in what not to do in photography”. It’s rather curious that an artist trained in France, where there were so many good photographers at that time was so far from the perfectionism that characterised the French photographic style.

Klein’s new esthetic had a marked influence on the contemporary photographic canons. When today I see photographs by home grown talents such as Kim Manresa o Txema Salvans, I feel Klein’s spirit is present. Curiously, following the earthquake he created, Klein practically disappeared from the world of photography and dedicated himself to cinema. As we say “he threw the stone and ran away”. The truth is that he threw it very far.

Needless to say this image has an unusually direct impact, like a photographic punch in the face. A young man, in fact a boy,is wandering the streets of the city. And, as is clear, he’s playing with a revolver, as you might expect in a society where fire arms constitute an essential reference point. He squares up to the photographer, arms the gun at him and shouts a threat at him:- Hands up or you’re a dead man! That doesn’t scare the photographer who points the camera and shoots without a second thought, as if it were a western showdown. No time to aim, no time to focus. Probably he was using a wide angle that gave him enough depth of field. Not enough of course to avoid the fist and gun ending up totally blurred. But that’s the point. To get a perfectly recognisable image but, thanks to its composition, a more aggressive and disturbing result. The boy’s face full of rage, violent even at play also reflects his own personality. His playmate, perhaps a younger brother, is watching him with total admiration; respect for an older peer, already able to fight with a gun in his hand. A real lesson about violence learned in childhood...)

Klein’s rejection of standard technical rules is quite obvious in his artistic achievements, distinguished by atypical focal points, motion blurs and high contrast. Klein also took his openly critical approach – towards media, fashion, excesses, North-American society and foreign policy) – to filmmaking, having produced over 250 commercials and having directed numerous films, from short films to feature-length fiction and documentary work. His most well-known film, besides the caustic anti-American fiction Mr. Freedom (1969), is Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?, 1966), an abrasive satire of the fashion industry, starring Dorothy McGowan as supermodel Polly Maggoo. Lees verder ... & zie ook ...

Life is Good & Good for You in New York was reissued in its entirety, with the bonus essay William Klein and the Radioactive Fifties, by American Art historian Max Kozloff. The photobook captures Klein’s description of New York as “the world capital of anguish”, and is a great example of the artist’s style and vision – which he claims to be conceived by “one American eye and one European eye”.

Klein’s iconic photobook can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com. A limited edition set is already available at Errata Editions’ shop; the set features Life is Good & Good for You in New York and three other books (Yutaka Takanashi’s Toshi-e, David Goldblatt’s In Boksburg and Koen Wessing’s Chili September 1973), with a reproduction tipped into the cloth cover of each book.

Hat + 5 Roses, Paris (Vogue), 1956