Positions

Photography of Architecture, City and Landscape in the Netherlands

Edited by Simon Franke, Allard Jolles, Piet Vollaard. Photographs by Theo Baart, Bas Princen, Ralph Kämena, Jannes Linders, Jeroen Musch, Hans Werlemann.
Published by NAi Publishers

Positions addresses the ascent of architectural photography as a discipline, and the changing role of the architectural photographer. Once merely charged with providing a purely documentary representation of a building, the architectural photographer now offers a personal interpretation of the work of the architect, urban planner or landscape designer--what the editors of this volume term "commissioned interpretive photography," which raises the question of what "working on assignment" might mean. The common factor that unites the photographers presented here--Theo Baart, Bas Princen, Ralph Kämena, Jannes Linders, Jeroen Musch and Hans Werlemann--is that each of them has brought a highly personal perspective to bear upon their approach to their commissions, and that each of their oeuvres has had a direct impact on contemporary architecture and urban planning. Positions examines the photographer's emancipation from documentary constraint to creative agency. A "selective historiography" provides an overview of the development of architectural photography on commission, and further texts describe methods of collaboration between photographer and architect. Zie voor een recensie ...

The Negotiable Landscape (2010) by Theo Baart

Until recently the different types of Netherlands’ landscape derived their names from the underlying soil conditions. This determined how the land could be used: building high rises where the soil was soggy (peat bog!) was tricky, in fact, a virtual impossibility. Nowadays, advancing building technology combines with fine-tuned financial instruments, making everything possible. There are new concepts, such as ‘double land use’ (‘with double land use a cost centre can be applied for non-cost-effective facilities’) so that it even becomes difficult to decide in one glance what you’re looking at. Transparency has disappeared. What you might have thought was a farmhouse turns out to be an ‘experiential farm’ – and landscapes gain a special status if they look attractive when viewed through the window of a passing car (‘motorway panorama’).

Landscape today is all a matter of language and experience. Everything is being redefined.

I love to rearrange my photos, making a new context for old work. In my contribution in this book I expanded an idea which I used in Atlas of Change and in Project Nederland (a pamflet on the transformation of the Dutch landscape with a essay by the Dutch writer Willem van Toorn): creating new typologies.

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