You will not find this photographer on the Internet or in a Dutch photography catalogue.
In some publications from the seventies you could come across his work. He grew up in a small Dutch border village where he continued to live his entire life. In this private community, his fellow villagers usually did not get far from home as they only visited family and friends in the immediate vicinity, but that did not apply to the photographer Pierre Segers.
He made his most important work in the seventies and eighties, times of great contradictions in Europe. On the one hand Eastern Europe with communism and dictatorships and on the other hand a Europe where the sexual revolution, the secularization, democratization and women’s equality brought about major changes.
In the early seventies Pierre Segers often travelled through Romania behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ in his ‘2CV’ to take photographs of villagers, country workers and gypsies. This was before the time dictator Ceauşescu decided to destroy eight thousand of those villages.
In remote areas in France Pierre Segers photographed people in sleepy villages as well as in Spain where dictator Franco ruled with an iron fist and where the photographer was told behind closed doors what aversion many inhabitants had against ‘El generalísimo’ and against the Catholic Church.
The sexual revolution, including the explicitly erotic work of a photographer like Robert Mapplethorpe also encouraged Pierre Segers to make outspoken male nude photographs, partly with the then popular Polaroid SX70 material.
The photographic legacy that Pierre Segers left behind is too special to be forgotten.
That is why now an exhibition has been made with vintage prints and a book of his work that do justice to his photographic legacy. As an homage two of his photography friends made a short film.
Pierre Segers, In Search of Lost Time
November 17th until December 16th, 2018
Stone Photo
Langhaagweg 21
6171BR Stein
the Netherlands
