In the PHOTO IMAGERY exhibition FLATLAND features work by Cristina García Rodero, Adam Jeppesen, the Sanchez Brothers, Hellen van Meene, Thomas Struth, David Hockney, Katharine Cooper, Ruud van Empel, Paolo Ventura, Hans op de Beeck, James Mollison, Nazif Topçuoğlu, Martin Usborne, Kim Boske, Jeroen Robert Kramer, Jocelyn Lee, Carla van de Puttelaar, Sally Mann, Sam Taylor-Wood (Sam Taylor-Johnson), Hendrik Kerstens, Rob Johannesma and Cuny Janssen. The exhibited works will change in the course of time; new works will be added and replace previous works. The works have been collected over 40 years during which time everything in the medium has changed.
The opposite of girl exploitation is seen in the staged images of Turkish artist Nazif Topçuoğlu (1953). In his arrangements with art-historical references, girls adopt traditional male roles such as Jesus or Abraham, as in the work “Is ‘t for real” symbolizing the empowerment of woman against contradicting positions of women in Turkey.
David Hockney (1937) used photography as a tool to paint, such as his small 1974 photograph that he took of his friend Yves-Marie Hervé in the South of France that shows the ever changing light of the rippling effect of water.
Adam Jeppesen’s (1978) tiny unique black and white oil on paper photographs are witness to his love for desolate landscapes.
Photography as simple as it can be, is Cuny Janssen’s (1975) colourful portrait of Indian children who look into her camera without any reserve.
The photographs from South Africa and Syria by Katharine Cooper (1978) are more involved; she identifies with her subjects, opposing the “objective” documentary photographer. Her work is currently exhibited at the Nationaal Militair Museum in Soest as part of the UNESCO exhibition.
Spending 4 years on the Caribbean island of Haiti, famed Spanish photographer Cristina García Rodero (1949) documented the vodou rituals of the Afro-Haitian community that live there. Rituales en Haití debuted in 2001 Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy.
Fascinated by the past and the traces of the people that have lived before us, Italian artist Paolo Ventura (1968) reconstructs an invented reality in reduced scale, but extremely realistically so you do not know what you are looking at. Experiencing the distance in Ventura’s (American) Civil War photosets might help us better understand the present.
The work included by Sally Mann (1951), one of America’s most renowned photographers, relates to her work on American South for which she is best known, besides her intimate portraits of her family. Mann asks powerful, provocative questions—about history, identity, race, and religion—that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries.