New location
As you could have read in the first part, Haute Photographie took place at a new and inspiring location in Amsterdam Noord, the creative heart of the city. Close to the NDSM ferry, in a neighbourhood bustling with cafés & restaurants, next to the water (we are in Holland aren’t we) and cultural venues. The new location, Pre-Reserved Studio C, is the perfect place for Haute to present more than 50 photographers. We received information on about 35 of them, and present you a selection. – in two parts.
Talent
In addition to the artists exhibited on the walls at Haute, you will also find a selection of 150 international photography talents who have been selected to show their work at Haute Photographie as part of our talent platform FRESH EYES
Books, magazines and special editions
From FRESH EYES to the publications is a small step. Books and special editions play an important role during this year’s Haute Photographie, with Artibooks hosting the book market. This renowned online bookstore and representative of Taschen Books will showcase numerous independent publications by international photographers, as well as works by well-known names. Haute Photographie offers visitors the chance to explore the latest books and discover several special editions. In addition, GUP Magazine will present an overview of notable publications from the past 17.5 years.
Photographers with Kahmann Gallery
Well: this is why you are reading the Eye: the photographers – and here they come!
With Albert Watson amongst the photographers – you really can’t open with another artist!
1 Albert Watson (1942)
Albert Watson is a Scottish photographer, based in New York. Watson is particularly famous for his iconic celebrity, fashion and art photography. His work is featured in galleries and museums worldwide. Watson is ranked among the most influential and successful photographers of all time. Through the wide variety and diversity of his images an effortless versatility is reflected, yet they are always identifiable as Albert Watson photographs by their visual impact and technical virtuosity. The power of Watson lies in his ability to capture and convey his interest in what he sees, be it fashion, nature or a movie star.
Watson has been photographing for over 40 years, working for the biggest magazines in the world, like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Rolling Stone, as well as ad campaigns for world-renowned brands. He has won many awards during his career and even received the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II in 2015. Throughout his career, Watson has also dedicated a big part of his time in producing a big collection of non-commissioned fine art. His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions worldwide and has been included in numerous international private and public collections.
2 Sante D’Orazio (1956)
Sante D’Orazio is an American photographer known for his celebrity portraiture, most notably images of nude supermodels and actresses. Born in Brooklyn, New York, D’Orazio studied painting at Brooklyn College before pursuing a career as a commercial photographer. He notably got his start working in fashion editorials thanks to Andy Warhol who hired him for Interview magazine in 1981. Like Peter Lindbergh and Herb Ritts, D’Orazio infuses his images with an overt sensuality. His book Sante D’Orazio: Barely Private (2009) captures private moments while on photo shoots, through the artist’s negatives, magazine spreads, Polaroids, and notations from 1997¬–2008. “My process of working is that I don’t create a picture, I find it,” he has explained.
3 Barry Kornbluh (1952)
During the early 1970s, Kornbluh began photographing while pursuing a degree in Art History. He moved to New York in 1977 and studied photography with Lisette Model who guided him towards a personal and intuitive style. During the 1980s, he worked in the archive of Magnum Photos and later freelanced as assistant to Elliott Erwitt, Susan Meiselas and Paul Fusco. Soon he was taking on his own assignments which included photographing the New York jazz scene as well as making portraits of literary and art world notables. However, his personal work remained at the forefront.
In the 1990s, Kornbluh moved to Amsterdam, where his poetic images of family and friends captured in grainy black & white took on new importance. In 2006, he joined Kahmann Gallery and would soon gain recognition for his dark and dreamy nudes and atmospheric landscapes. Although Kornbluh is a master of analogue photography, he has recently embraced the digital printing of his work allowing him to produce images in large formats.
4 Schilte & Portielje
The couple, who live and work in Rotterdam, are primarily known for their photography of series of unusual and very recognizable figurines. They display an intricate way of playing with and relating to each other: fantastic poetic, dreamlike figures who abduct the spectator into the artists world of wonders and miracles. The figures approach in the middle of a nondescript, plain, undefined room. They offer frontal and back views and grotesquely contorted bodies. They wear costumes adorned with veils and lace, corsages and garters, jewellery, neckties and collars, transparent fabrics and body hugging clothes. All these accessories create different characters in this theatrical role play. The game lives in abstraction. How do huge feet go with a delicate body? Which intricacies are woven into the mesh of physical abnormalities? How do these bodies relate to the pieces of furniture that have been added to the decor for the characters to hold onto or lean against? It is the full intention of the artists not to give a satisfactory answer to these questions, they willingly create confusion and force the spectator to focus more intensely.
During recent years, the artists perfected their mise en scene. “Photoworks beyond reality” emphasizes surprising moments in surrealist, erotically charged moments. This creates a scrapbook full of subtle hints and uncertain role play. We can never see the full faces of Schilte & Portielje‘s figurines, mouth and nose are rarely recognizable, the entire head is mostly covered by eclectic hats, fabrics, hairdos or the entire face is headed another way
5 Marcus Schaefer (1987)
Marcus Schaefer is a multi-disciplinary artist and film director. His driving force is pressuring impulse to capture his current state of mind. In a world predominantly ruled by colour images, Schaefer seeks avenues of escape and expression through the visual aesthetics of black and white photography. Exploring intimacy, sensitivity, and abstraction, his images challenge the false preconception that black-and-white photography is outdated and less expressive. The photographer puts the colour black at the heart of his work, using it as a central component of his visual messaging.
Black, as the absence of colour and absorption of light, the signifier of evil, death, and fear, is newly interpreted in creative ways. Schaefer overturns the binary of black and white to create a sophisticated system of new meanings throughout the images – black acquires vulnerability and softness, becoming the site of a further entanglement of representation. The series of mostly black and white compositions feel vulnerable, and otherworldly and create a vision of seductive allure. Schaefer is not interested in technical perfection; he is intrigued by spontaneity and imprecision. The element of mistake is fundamental in all his creative endeavours.”
“Beyond photography, Schaefer is also a drawer and uses his holistic understanding of art to inform his photographic choices and evocative storytelling. Charcoal drawing is an experimental practice and vessel for his imagination.”
6 Neeltje de Vries (1976)
Amsterdam based photographer Neeltje de Vries crafts timeless narratives of women from the present, past and future, like film stills, where nudity is a functional artistic choice that accentuates not only purity and a connection with nature but also literally liberates. Neeltje’s women aren’t trying to please the viewer.
These women are, and they are sufficient unto themselves. They don’t want anything from you, regardless of what you want, are equally untamed and untameable.
Neeltje not only breaks free from the traditional way women are looked at, she also demonstrates that women are so much more than what they’ve been reduced to by the dominant male gaze and centuries-old stereotyping in a patriarchal society. Above all, she offers her unique perspective on what it means to be a woman, on what it means to break free from expectations, prejudices, roles, and patterns.
Characteristic are the geometric figures and cropping, stemming from her past as a graphic designer.
Searching for the right balance, she plays with lines, shapes and frames, often incorporating the models.
7 Jonas Bjerre Poulsen (1976)
Fragmenting bodies, architecture and nature, the Danish photographer Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen (Denmark) reinvents the forms around him as luminous images, creating intimate and enigmatic juxtapositions that invite the viewer to look again and imagine what lies beyond the frame.
Trained at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, He mixes his spatial sensibility and understanding of shape with conceptual thoughts and visions that bring creative projects to life. Bjerre-Poulsen has a strong vocation for creating thoughtful works that stand out in an understated, refined manner. For him it is all about balance. Balance between richness and restraint, between order and complexity. Minimalism that acquires softness and visual matter that assumes haptic qualities.
Bjerre-Poulsen has a passion for phenomenology, the philosophical study of human experience. As human beings, we tend to understand the world through a viewpoint that is related to our own body, our own symmetry and scale. But all forms in the universe are structured around the same patterns—from a molecular to celestial scale. When we understand life from that perspective, we understand that humans, nature and the built environment are all part of the same geometric and structural patterns. We translate what we perceive in nature and how we understand our own bodies into what we see in the arts.
The sphere is a recurring motif in his work. It is an image that according to Bjerre-Poulsen could be used to understand life. It is a strong symbol that defines the most intimate of spaces; the womb, relationships between people, and that between man and God. The balance of spheres is what makes nature predictable and mathematical. Geometry is an abstract system of formalization that makes sense to us—squares, triangles, circles. This understanding is incorporated into how we physically construct and mentally understand the world.
8 Jan C Schlegel (1965)
At the age of 14 Jan Schlegel discovered his passion for photography by attending a photo course at school. And now in the midst of the digital age we live in, Schlegel opts for the darkroom photographic tradition. His exact knowledge of the instruments and the development process is surprising.
Jan explores the boundaries of his medium and asks universal existential questions about identity, beauty and uniqueness of every living thing in all its detail, forms and structures.
He doesn’t only create artistic photographs, but also documents and preserves unique pieces of art – the people themselves. None of the people photographed wear special make-up or were specially dressed before the photographs were taken. Nothing was staged, nothing is fake. They were all captured in their own habitat, that is the passion of Jan, capturing the essence of people, animals and objects is an extraordinary way, evidencing his passion for classical photography and his sensitivity towards nature.
Jan Schlegel his works are reminiscent of original genres of photography and at the same time a renaissance of the old craft of photographic art, which is uniquely able to combine two characteristics – the highest achievable quality and eternal beauty. He explores the boundaries of his medium and asks universal existential questions about identity, beauty and uniqueness of every living thing in all its detail, forms and structures. He is also a master of slowed down photography – he studies, analyses and dissects, thus creating documentary, nearly surrealistic portraits with the greatest concentration on the essence and with extraordinary depth.
9 Sara Punt (1994)
Sara Punt uses photography to display an ongoing exploration of the human essence, body and expression. Till this day, our bodies are still overly sexualised instead of seen as the works of art they actually are. For that reason, we aren’t taught how to use our body to make the ones around us feel something real. Something that doesn’t consist of ego and judgement, but of empathy and kindness. Sara’s photography created a path for her to break patriarchal ideals and to rediscover who she is as a creative being.
She captures raw lines, calm movement and natural distortion: patterns that represent the transformation we all go through when we shed the layers of societies’ standards.
By developing close relationships with her subjects, she creates an environment where there is room for organic vulnerability and shapes images with the intention to find love for our human form.
Her photographs are able to stand on their own as well as serve as a unified and cohesive body of work when paired together.
10 Rolf van Rooij (2003)
Rolf van Rooij started out creating photographs while exploring urban environments. In these photographs, he often includes people in a rather abstract form. This gives the otherwise graphic representation of e.g. architecture something humane and gracious. This can sometimes result in a detached feeling for the viewer. Every work consists of elements that can be looked at separately but always work together.
Recently he started making abstract impressions. The creative process behind these works is a critical examination of photography as a medium, a search for what he calls an honest artwork and also a form of self-expression.
Photography is most often seen as a figurative medium. But, what happens when you take away all these figurative elements of a photograph? What happens when a photograph becomes abstract? His Photographic Abstraction relies on its own internal logic that consists of a dynamic between black and white, structure, flow, form and texture.
Instead of representing visual aspects of our reality, he aims to convey his own interpretation of reality through abstraction; therewith representing something beyond the physical.
11 Olga Wagemans (1983)
“With personal identity falling away, a universal phenomenon emerges.”
Olga observes people and it has been her focus and her attention throughout her life, and initially, it helped her survive, later this has developed into a fascination for what makes people tick. She’s curious about what is hidden behind the mask of the individual, as we live in times of polarization of society and individualization.
Olga challenges and questions the identity we ascribe to ourselves and others. This identity determines to a great extent how we relate to others and the world around us.
For ‘What remains beyond’ she used a heat camera with the aim to “de-picture” the outer identity and to explore if there is a core that remains and unites all people. She applied this technique, outer attributes such as age, gender or colour of skin often disappear.
12 Nora Papp (1975)
Are you an abstract-enthusiast? Make sure you don’t miss the chance to see Nora Papp’s unique works printed on glass. Nora Papp’s starting point for this work during her studies, at the Rietveld Academie, was the ‘Instagram’- application for smartphones.
She uses the deconstruction of a digital image to collect ‘aesthetic data’. Her scientific method to create the images, is a record of keeping all her aesthetic choices and those choices become data for her next image to create. The choice to combine or to apply these elements in a certain manner, and simultaneously to list the values that she considers artistically significant, creates a new image. And for creating the image she mainly works with the luminosity or brightness, contrast, structure, warmth, saturation and colour. With these elements Nora combines the elements and creates an image where you can keep looking at.
Location:
Pre-Reserved Studio C,
Tt. Vasumweg 38A,
1033SC Amsterdam.
www.haute-photography.com
John Devos
Correspondent L’Œil de la Photographie/Eye of Photographie
john.devos01(a)gmail.com
