Jacqueline Hassink (1966 - 2018) Liked to Capture the Silence next to Places of Power Conceptual Photography

Published on 28 November 2018
Obituary: Jacqueline Hassink, photographer 1966-2018
written by Marigold Warner

Lancia girl, Paris 25 September 2004. From Car Girls by Jacqueline Hassink, published by Aperture

The New York-based, Dutch photographer, who has died aged just 52, was known for long-term projects exploring global economic power in boardrooms, the commoditisation of women at car fairs, and our addiction to technology

“I was trained as a sculptor, and this was the first time I had used the camera,” wrote Jacqueline Hassink in the Financial Times in 2011, of her breakthrough project The Table of Power. Between 1993 and 1995 Hassink contacted forty of the largest multinational corporations in Europe, asking to photograph their boardrooms. “I wanted to find a table that symbolised modern society’s most important value: economic power,” she writes. Nineteen refused, while the remaining 21, in Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy, eventually agreed.

The book was published in 1996; it was the first time that photographs of these places had been made public, and in the spring of 2009, after the global recession, Hassink decided to revisit the boardrooms. With The Table of Power 2, she examined how boardroom design, revenue and employee numbers had changed over the intervening years.

Hassink, who has died aged just 52, was born in Enschede, the Netherlands, on 15 July 1966. She trained to be a sculptor at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and then at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in Norway, but after graduating in 1992, presented herself mainly as a photographer, publishing nine books – including another celebrated title, Car Girls, in 2009. It was shot over five years at car shows across seven cities in three different continents, including New York, Paris, Geneva, Tokyo, Detroit, and Shanghai, focusing in on differing cultural standards on ideals of beauty on the women paid to pose with the cars.

Jeep girl, Shanghai 21 April 2005

“I was just like the visitors of that car show, I was hunting for that interesting moment,” she said in an interview at an Aperture Foundation event in 2009.  Hassink captured the moments in which the women became more like tools in the sale of the vehicle, titling each photograph with the brand of the car they were selling to reinforce the idea they were being presented as commodities and fantasies relating to luxury and power.

Hassink often worked on her projects for years; one of her longest projects, View Kyoto, published in 2015, was developed over ten years. In it she travelled to Zen buddhist temples and gardens in Japan, after being captivated by the culture after her first visit in the late 1990s while on assignment with Fortune magazine. “I saw that it was really special, the ‘pearl’ of Japan,” she said in an interview with Slate Magazine in 2015. “I thought it was unique because there is no divide between public and private, no windows in the temples, and when the sliding doors are open, it creates a flowing world.”

Unwired (2018) also started in Japan, and is Hassink’s most recent body of work to be published. It examines the relationship between human and digital worlds, confronting our addiction to technology through contrasting photographs of landscapes in which there is no phone reception, and plugged-in commuters. The project was exhibited in January this year at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam.

Hassink died of cancer, aged 52, on Thursday 22 November 2018 in Amsterdam.

See also

Views & Reviews UNWIRED Graphic Design Irma Boom JACQUELINE HASSINK Conceptual Photography

the Table of Power Jacqueline Hassink Iconography of Work Mirelle Thijsen's Choice of Company Photobooks Photography

Hassink legde naast plekken van macht graag de stilte vast

Kunstenaar Jacqueline Hassink (1966 - 2018) werd vooral bekend met kantoorfoto’s van multinationals. De laatste jaren zocht ze vaker de natuur en de stilte op. Donderdag overleed ze op 52-jarige leeftijd.

Rianne van Dijck
26 november 2018

Jacqueline Hassink in 2007 in New York.
Foto Dana Lixenberg 

Nadat ze bijna haar hele carrière had gewijd aan het bestuderen en in beeld brengen van macht, in glanzende kantoortorens en op evenementen waar de champagne rijkelijk vloeide, zocht Jacqueline Hassink de laatste jaren steeds meer de stilte op.

Voor haar laatste project, Unwired, reisde ze de wereld over om op zoek te gaan naar plekken zonder digitaal bereik – daar waar de verbondenheid met de natuur voor haar voelbaar was. „Zeker voor je creativiteit heb je soms behoefte aan die stilte, dat niets”, vertelde ze in een interview met deze krant, eerder dit jaar. Jacqueline Hassink (Enschede 1966 - Amsterdam 2018) overleed afgelopen donderdag aan de gevolgen van kanker, ze werd 52 jaar oud.

Hassink, die sinds 1996 in New York woonde, brak na haar kunstopleidingen in Den Haag en het Noorse Trondheim door met The Table of Power (1993-1995), waarvoor ze de bestuurskamers fotografeerde van multinationals uit de Fortune Global 500 lijst.

Bestuurskamer Robert H. Benmosche in 2000
Collectie Huis Marseille

Ook voor Female Power Stations: Queen Bees (1996-2000) en Arab Domains (2005-2006) focuste ze op macht, dit keer van vrouwelijke CEO’s. Met The Table of Power 2, (2009-2011), waar ze na de crisis ook banken en financiële instellingen aan toevoegde, won ze in 2013 de Dutch Doc Award. Het was een van de vele prijzen die ze voor haar fotografie en haar boeken – ze maakte er meer dan tien, de laatste jaren samen met ontwerper Irma Boom – zou krijgen.

Kenmerkend voor Hassinks fotografie is haar conceptuele, seriematige manier van werken. De strenge bestuurskamers oogden nog strakker door de afwezigheid van mensen – die leiden alleen maar af, zo meende zij. Haar ging het vooral om het idee en een zo consciëntieuze mogelijke uitwerking daarvan.

Shoden-ji, Kyoto, 2004
Collectie Huis Marseille

Ze stond bekend om haar gedegen research en lange adem. Voor View, Kyoto (2004-2014) bijvoorbeeld, haar eerste project over stilte en natuur, bezocht ze in meerdere jaren met de fiets meer dan zeventig Japanse tempels en kloosters en maakte ze intensief contact met boeddhistische monniken, voordat ze echt met fotograferen begon.

Het Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam verwierf onlangs alle werken van Unwired, dat dit voorjaar nog in het museum geëxposeerd werd. Hassink schonk het museum verder een complete set afdrukken van The Table of Power, haar (negatieven)archief en alle bijbehorende documentatie worden door het museum in beheer genomen. „Toen ze wist dat ze niet meer beter zou worden, is ze met ons in gesprek gegaan”, vertelt Frits Gierstberg, curator van het Fotomuseum. „Te weten dat haar werk in goede handen zou zijn, gaf haar rust.”

© Jacqueline Hassink

Fiat girl, Shanghai 21 April 2005

Alfa Romeo girl 1, Geneva 1 March 2005

Maserati girl 3, Frankfurt 11 September 2007

Langisjór 3, 64°2’18″N 18°32’34″W , Road F235, Vatnajökulsþjóðgarður, Iceland, Summer, 17 August 2015 JPG-Format (728 KB) 1000 x 788 Pixel © Jacqueline Hassink, from the book Unwired, published by Hatje Cantz

Onoaida 8, 30°17’59″N 130°31’49″E, Onoaida Trail, Yakushima, Japan Fall, 2 October 2016 JPG-Format (1.438 KB) 1000 x 787 Pixel © Jacqueline Hassink, from the book Unwired, published by Hatje Cantz

© Jacqueline Hassink

© Jacqueline Hassink

Tokyo 29, Tokyo, Japan 24 March 2014, 15:27, iPhone 5s JPG-Format (459 KB) 750 x 1000 Pixel © Jacqueline Hassink, from the book Unwired, published by Hatje Cantz

Paris 7, Paris, France, 1 June 2015 16:41, iPhone 6 JPG-Format (494 KB) 750 x 1000 Pixel © Jacqueline Hassink, from the book Unwired, published by Hatje Cantz

Shanghai 64, Shanghai, China, 4 December 2016, 13:19, iPhone 7 JPG-Format (637 KB) 750 x 1000 Pixel © Jacqueline Hassink, from the book Unwired, published by Hatje Cantz

A Modern Gothic Dante's Inferno In this Dark Wood Artists Book How We See Elisabeth Tonnard Photography

In this Dark Wood
Tonnard, Elisabeth
Published by Elisabeth Tonnard, Rochester, New York, U.S.A., 2008

This is a copy of the original first edition of In this Dark Wood, published by the artist during her stay in Rochester, 2008. Below you'll find a text on this wonderful book. The gallery represents the artist's work, including the limited editions of One Swimming Pool, Interior Monologue and The Man of the Crowd. "This book is a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations I collected of the first lines of Dante¿s Inferno. The images, showing a crowd of solitary figures, are selected from the same archive as used for my book Two of Us (the extraordinary Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers working in San Francisco from the 40¿s to the 70¿s). The book is set up in a repetitious way, to stress a sense of similarity, endlessness and interchangeability. The images are re-expressions of each other, and so are the texts." (text by Elisabeth Tonnard).

How We See: Photobooks by Women, 10×10 Photobooks’ latest project and publication presents a global range of 21st-century photobooks by female photographers.

With historical records establishing 19th-century British photographer Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853) as the first photobook, it is not surprising that women have consistently contributed to the rich history of photobook making. 10×10 Photobooks has organized How We See—a hands-on reading room, “books on books” publication and series of public events—to explore the distinctive content, design and intellectual attributes in photobooks produced by women.

The comprehensive How We See publication—with images and texts for all the photobooks in the project—is an invaluable reference and resource. In addition to all one hundred books in the reading room, the publication includes one hundred historical books by women photographers, an annotated chronology, and several essays on the history and practice of photobooks by women.

Featured photographers include Laia Abril, Ying Ang, Olivia Arthur, Sophie Calle, Xiaoyi Chen, Zoe Croggon, Cristina de Middel, Laura El-Tantawy, Abigail Heyman, Hannah Höch, Dragana Jurišic, Kristina Jurotschkin, Pixy Liao, Susan Meiselas, Lucia Moholy, Zanele Muholi, Yurie Nagashima, Catherine Opie, Maya Rochat, Guadalupe Ruiz, Eva Saukane, Collier Schorr, Ketaki Sheth, Lieko Shiga, Dayanita Singh, Mitra Tabrizian, Carrie Mae Weems, among many others.

See also

Dutch Female Photopgraphers How We See: Photobooks by Women 10x10 Photobooks Photography

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2009
In This Dark Wood by Elisabeth Tonnard

Last weekend was another small artbook fair in New York at which I made an exciting discovery in the work of a young Dutch poet and visual artist named Elisabeth Tonnard. Tonnard has been in residence at Rochester's Visual Studies Workshop and has created several artist books over the past several years. One title that was a must own for me was her book In This Dark Wood published in 2008. I am one year late to add this to my Best of 2009 list but since I make the rules here, I will happily add it anyway.

In This Dark Wood presents a selection of photographs from an archive that is currently housed at the Visual Studies Workshop. The pictures are from a commercial photo firm called "Fox Movie Flash" which was owned by a man named Joseph Selle. Working in the San Francisco area, Selle and a team of street photographers made casually framed fleeting portraits of pedestrians intended to be sold to the passers-by after development.

Shot with half frame cameras that would hold a 100 foot roll of 35mm film, each roll captured more than 1500 photographs. The archive consists of over a million images made from the 1930s to the 70s.

Tonnard constructed her book using 90 of the photographs paired with 90 different English translations of the first line of Dante's Inferno:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la via diritta era smarrita.

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood
for I had wandered off from the straight path.

Selle's unsuspecting subjects walking alone and caught in the light of the flash, become the multitude of alienated souls wandering "the dark woods" of the city. What is amazing about this work is how, accompanied by the suggestion of the text, the environs surrounding each subject heighten the metaphor. Movie marquees caught in the upper corners of the frames read movie titles of violence and doom; "Ring of Fire," "Hell is a City," "...from Hell," "Petrified World, "Nightfall," "Corridors of Blood."

Tonnard sequenced the photographs to emphasize repetition and further sense of - in Tonnard's words - moving "incessantly to and fro" without seemingly making any progress much like Dante's lost souls. By stressing the difference in translations, Tonnard is also emphasizing the fluidity of language and thus a path that may appear straight but is in constant flux.

In This Dark Wood is a print on demand book in an open edition. The size of a trade paperback it is simple in its design and construction which can make the price tag on first glance seem high. It isn't an elegant presentation (her creation is certainly deserving of better treatment) but the photographs are wonderfully striking and not without their individual surprise.

Highly recommended.

Check Elisabeth Tonnard's website for other books and ordering information.

Postcards of Africa Africana Historic Postcard Collection Photography

Africa (September 1997) is an example of the helpful, widely distributed low-cost maps issued by the Central Intelligence Agency (cia) of the U.S. government. The CIA produces maps regularly to reflect changes in geographical names and boundaries. As government documents, they are not protected by copyright and are therefore popular for use and reproduction by others.

See also

Postcard from the Congo Carl de Keyzer Photography

Africa in the PhotoBook A selection of rare photobooks by Irène Attinger Oumar Ly Photography

Views & Reviews Africa in the Photobook Ben Krewinkel Photography

Africana Historic Postcard Collection

After European powers met at the event called the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 to negotiate and formalize claims to African territory, nations in Africa faced European imperialist conquest and eventual colonization. By 1900 most of the entire African continent, except the independent states of Liberia and Ethiopia, was under European political control. Throughout the period of European colonialism in Africa, postcards played an important role in popularizing the venture of European colonial rule and in perpetuating long-held stereotypes of the vast African continent. Postcards were so widely disseminated that they appear to comprise the majority of nineteenth century photographic representations of the African continent.

The African Coach and Four Transport System.  W.M.M.S. Postcards, Series, circa 1920s.

The African Section of the Library of Congress’ African and Middle Eastern Division has amassed a unique collection of more than 2000 historical photographic postcards documenting an important visual record of Africa and its people during the historically intensive years of European colonialism, from 1895 to 1960.

The Africana Historic Postcard Collection has significant value for researchers and students working on sub-Saharan Africa’s colonial life and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to documenting representations of African life from a specific period of time, postcards images also chronicle the transformation of cultural, political and social landscapes in the African continent.

Westmoreland Street, Freetown,  Sierra Leone.  Published by Lisk-Carew Brothers. (?).

Most of the postcard imagery from the African colonies was taken by military and colonial officials, missionary workers and professional photographers. Images unique to the collection include the works of Ukrainian-born postcard photographer-producer Casimir Zagourski (1883-1944) and prolific French photographer and ethnographer Francois Edmond Fortier (1862-1928) who disseminated the most comprehensive photographic record of West Africa. African postcard photographers include notable names such as Alphonso Lisk-Carew from Sierra Leone, Demba N’Diaye from Senegal, W.S. Johnston from Gold Coast (now Ghana) or Sierra Leone, F.W.H. Arkurst from Gold Coast, Frederick Grant from Gold Coast, N. Walwin Holm from Gold Coast and Alex Agbablo Accolatse from Togo.

A Dancing Devil.  Mende Secret Poro Society of Sierra Leone. Published by Ralph Tuck & Sons (?).

More than any other photographic format, colonial era postcard images of Africa and African peoples helped to reinforce and perpetuate 19th century European stereotypes of Africa as the “dark continent”, devoid of history or cultre. As the antithesis of Western ‘cultural superiority’, Africans were characterized in postcard representations as “savage and uncivilized people”, an exotic other, with no cultural ownership. This stereotyped visual representation of African peoples played a critical role in Europe’s rationale for its so-called ‘civilizing mission’ in Africa.

War Drums of Ashanti Tribesman, Gold Coast, West Africa, Ghana.

In general, postcard production for the African continent focused on indigenous people and the civilizing effect of colonial-missionary systems. In addition to imagery that attempted to define and classify anthropometric profiles of African ethnic “types”, postcard representations depicted dress and adornment, body decoration, indigenous settlements, scenes of daily activities and ceremonies and rituals. Equally important, many postcards featured local chiefs or kings dressed in ceremonial regalia and other elite.

Italian Occupation of Eritrea during the 1930s

One of the most prominent themes of colonial era postcards was imagery that documented the scope of colonial projects, including the construction of new buildings, roads, bridges, railroads, industries and the exploitation of minerals and other natural resources. Postcard representations also showed images of landscapes, cities, and towns before and in the early stages of “modern” development. Postcard images depicting specific political or historical events such as the arrival and departure of important European dignitaries in Africa was another popular colonial postcard genre.

Jan Beyzym, Polish Jesuit missionary in Madgascar among children with leprosy, (1902?). 

Missionary postcard publishing during this era provides an interesting glimpse into the culture and impact of the Christian missionary society enterprise in colonial Africa  The images largely capture the influences of medical and evangelistic endeavors, caring for the sick, education, and Western technology and fashions. Missionary postcard imagery also emphasized the subject matter of indigenous African peoples and customs.

“Somali Beauty”. Published by Foto Parodi, Mogadiscio, Somalia, Serie D (no imprint).Circa 1900.

Another stereotyped image of colonial Africa postcards were the pervasive nude or semi-nude depictions of the body of indigenous African people, especially African women and girls. These portrait postcards, typically featuring erotic content and often overtly pornographic content, catered to prevailing Eurocentric male fantasies about the ‘primitive’ sexuality of African women, the Other. This provocative stereotyped imagery was actively used in colonial propaganda campaigns to lure European men to the colonies for work, or to make them enlist in the navy or colonial armies.  A large series of semi-nude postcard images featuring male “warriors” with weapons were also widely distributed

The Africana Historic Postcard Collection augments a number of rich and diverse visual resource collections in the Library of Congress, including the archival collections of the Basel Mission, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the Royal Commonwealth Society Photograph Collection, the Frank and Francis Carpenter Collection and the American Colonization Society photographic collection housed in the Library’s Microform and Prints and Photographs reading rooms.

As additional postcards are cataloged and digitized they will be added to the collection.  Original postcard formats are available to the research community in the African and Middle Eastern Division reading room (Thomas Jefferson Building, Room 220) during opening hours Monday to Friday from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm.  Closed Saturday, Sunday and federal holidays.  To access the collection the user must agree to the Reading Room’s condition of use.   To access the collection the user must agree to the Reading Room’s condition of use.  To contact the African and Middle Eastern Division or to make an appointment to visit the Reading Room call (202) 707-4188.   For more information on the collection or the project, please email Dr. Angel Batiste  abat@loc.gov or call (202) 707-1980.

Special thanks to volunteer interns Danielle Gantt, Joel Horowitz, Dr. Lydia Kakwera Levy and Renee Namakau Ombaba who provided valuable assistance in scanning images and compiling brief item-level bibliographic descriptions for this project.

View collection of postcards by region as indicated below:

Central Africa
Democratic Republic of Congo

East Africa
Djibouti
Eritrea and Ethiopia
French Islands, Mayotte, Reunion
Kenya
Madagascar
Somalia
The Comoros
Tanzania
Uganda

West Africa
Ghana
Liberia
Nigeria
Sierra Leone

Islam In sub-Saharan Africa
Islam in sub-Saharan Africa

Views & Reviews Neo-Provoke LA Drive-By Artists Book Michael Lange Photography

LA Drive-By door Michael Lange

Andere auteurs: Text by Andreas Kilb. Design by SYB (Sybren Kuiper).

self-published, Hamburg, Germany

L.A DRIVE-BY is a unique artist photo book by German photographer Michael Lange showing the seedy side of Los Angeles in the 1990s. In 72 images displayed on 192 pages, the viewer drifts through the opaque and obscure cityscapes of Central and South Los Angeles.

„Here, south and east of the city center, black and Latino gangs control the life away from the boulevards and avenues. Here, open accounts are being settled with bullets from moving cars, and whoever drives through during the day – at night one is well-advised to stay on the Freeway and whoever has car trouble and needs to stop, locks the car, pulls out his cell phone to call 911 and waits for the tow truck – avoids the small streets, alleyways, the soft shoulders and railway crossings, holds onto the the steering wheel and focusses ot the street names: Florence, Slauson, Alameda, Rosecrans, El Segundo.“  Andreas Kilb

In his grainy and gritty black and white photographs, shot entirely out of the car on Polapan35 over a period of five years, Lange pays homage to the multilayered soul of LA submerging into the impoverished , industrial and gang-land sections of the city of angels.

The result is a unmatched book containing fold-out photographs up to eight times their original page size – leaving the viewer with the impression of looking at a collection of posters inside a photo book. This innovative creation by the renowned Dutch designer Sybren Kuiper (SYB) paralleles Lange’s cruising experience through LA, and is in sync with the designer’s philosophy that, the viewing should be an experience in itself, not linear – but like drifting through the city at random“.

In his introduction the German film critic Andreas Kilb refers to the photographs as tarot cards „that tell the future of the city that once was desert and will be desert again“ while simultaneously evoking LA’s darkest movie scenes.

Printed in Germany and hand bound in the Netherlands, the first edition is of 500 numbered and signed copies.

Michael Lange, L.A Drive-By
Selfpublication
72 images, 192 pages