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Van Zoetendaal Collections

Late in 2006 the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag acquired a major collection of photographs compiled by Amsterdam gallery owner and publisher Willem van Zoetendaal. The museum’s photo-collection was expanded at a stroke by more than 1000 items, including not only early and previously unknown work by modern photographers of the calibre of Rineke Dijkstra, Koos Breukel, Blommers & Schumm, Hellen van Meene...

‘A wonderful accident’

With Nikon Nederland as a new patron this year, the future of the Dutch Association of Insurers Photography Prize competition is twice as secure. Thanks in part to this new support from Nikon, there is now more prize money and the competition is open to more contestants. The presentation of the prizes by a prominent jury and the celebratory opening of the accompanying exhibition are scheduled to...

Yuri Rost

In today’s Russia, many people see photographer and journalist Yuri Rost (b. Kiev, 1939) as the embodiment of the dissident press of the 1970s and ’80s that helped to bring about the collapse of the totalitarian Soviet regime in 1991. As a critical columnist and commentator for the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily paper and other publications, and also as the presenter of his own current affairs...

Michael Najjar

German artist Michael Najjar is fascinated by scenarios for the future of mankind. In his large-format photographs and video works, he creates a simultaneously exciting and disturbing picture of human beings as artificial, technological beings. In his newest series, bionic angel (2006-2008), now to be shown at the GEM / Hague Museum of Photography for the first time in its entirety, Najjar goes a...

MC1R – Natural Redheads

Hanne van der Woude’s (b. 1982) exhibition MC1R – Natural Redheads focuses on the aesthetic attractions of people with red hair, but also reveals their vulnerability. When Van der Woude read in a newspaper report that red hair might be dying out in the population, her existing admiration developed into something approaching an obsession.

Martin Eder

We live in a world of desires and are tricked out of our actual hunger for it with dummies. -Martin Eder. Provocative, almost kitschy paintings of baby animals and prototype females with perfect curves – that’s how we first saw Martin Eder’s work, in the 2007 group Netherlands / Germany - Painting / Malerei. Now, in his first ever solo exhibition in any Dutch museum, he reveals a completely...

Erwin Olaf

With their averted eyes half open, staring into nothingness, the models in the photographs in Erwin Olaf’s latest series, Fall, evoke a strange kind of aloofness. The portraits are interspersed with still lifes of plants and flowers in simple ceramic vases. With its use of colour, the strange, almost awkward expressions on the faces of the models and the almost unreal setting, the series Fall is...

Silver Camera 2008

The first Silver Camera contest was run in 1949 by the Dutch Association of Press Photographers (NVF). The competition was intended to enhance the quality of work by the association’s own members. In 1955 the Silver Camera contest engendered an international version of itself: the World Press Photo competition.

Man Ray

Man Ray (1890-1976) used his camera to turn photography into an art – no mean feat for a man who tried almost all his life to avoid being described as a ‘photographer’. He preferred to be identified with his work in other media: drawings, paintings and Dadaist ready-mades. The exhibition entitled Unconcerned, but not indifferent at the Hague Museum of Photography is a large-scale retrospective of...

FABULOUS FICTIONS

Both Paolo Ventura and Jasper de Beijer play with reality in their photographs. After all, a photograph shows what is seen through the lens. However, what if that is not actually reality, but a specially constructed version of reality? In his series War Souvenir and Winter Stories Ventura photographed events that he himself had never witnessed, bringing them to life with miniatures, scale models...