The next edition of the FOTODOK Book Club on 3 December has the theme ‘The Dutch Edition’. A lot of special photo books have appeared in the Netherlands in the past period. And they deserve extra attention these days:
Thomas Kuijpers – Hoarder Order (via Skype)
Heleen Peeters – Horse
Antoinette de Jong & Robert Knoth – Tree and Soil
Marvel Harris – Inner Journey
Louisiana from Onna – Early Ed
Delphine Bedel will do a spoken word column. The evening’s presentation is in the hands of creative deputy editor-in-chief of De Correspondent Sterre Sprengers and photographer and photobook enthusiast Rob Hornstra.
Thomas Kuijpers talks about his latest book Hoarder Order, which has been shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards as the best photo book of 2020. His work always stems from a (series of) current event (s), which he investigates on how these stories influence our daily existence. Thomas collects a lot of material: from newspapers, snippets of conversations he overhears in the street, video material from Youtube, posters on the wall at the bus stop, comments on Twitter. From this collection new connections emerge, insights into the way in which narratives are shaped around certain subjects. Also new work arises – in which the source material is often still visible. Hoarder Order covers the period from 2000 to 2020.
Heleen Peters talks about her book Horse. Heleen’s grandfather started a company in 1948 in what many people nowadays would consider a taboo: horse meat. Starting with the family business, Peeters immersed herself in horsemeat culture in Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, Kyrgyzstan, the United States and Canada. Why is horsemeat less and less popular? What happens to horses if they are no longer eaten? How do we relate to animals at all? And what about the need to reduce our meat consumption?
Photographers / media makers Antoinette de Jong and Robert Knoth regularly traveled to the deserted landscapes of Fukushima in Japan between 2011 and 2018. As archaeologists of the future, they tried to understand what had happened in the distant past. In their book Tree and Soil they combine these images with work from the Siebold collections, named after Philipp Franz von Siebold, who was part of the Dutch trade delegation in Japan in the early 19th century. He collected plants, animals, artifacts and thousands of paintings and drawings, which show how Japanese culture is rooted in nature. Siebold was typical of the explorers who traveled the world during this period in search of natural treasures that humanity could use. That time can now be seen as a prequel to the Anthropocene, the era in which our planet was profoundly changed in many ways by human activity.
Marvel Harris recorded his gender transition from woman to man in Inner Journey. He wanted to publish his story in a book because he was missing examples of people he recognized himself in. “I thought my project was mainly about my gender transition. I gradually discovered that it is much more about the long-term search for myself: being a person with feelings, constantly developing. ”
Photographer Louisiana van Onna designed the book Early Ed, the pioneering years that her father Edwin van Onna wrote about the period 1944-1956 prior to the great success of Ed Van der Elsken. How he was welcomed by Christian anarchist anti-militarists in Bergeijk during the last year of the Second World War; how he became acquainted with photography in Wormerveer; how he immersed himself in high society circles in Paris. After the publication of A Love Story in Saint Germain des Prés in 1956, Ed van der Elsken’s international breakthrough was a fact and his name as a street photographer established.
Delphine Bedel will do a spoken column during the Book Club.
All available seats are sold out for the FOTODOK Book Club in the Cloud Nine in TivoliVredenburg. Livestream tickets are available via this link:
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