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October 28, 2009
Hans Aarsman is a Dutch photographer, author, and lecturer at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and is known as a significant figure in the New Topography movement. He started his career as a photojournalist for the Dutch newspaper Trouw In 1989 he published the book Hollandse Taferelen which consisted of landscapes photographed from the roof of a camper which he pulled through the Netherlands for a year.
Hans Aarsman, Kattensloot (from Hollandse Taferelen), 1995, C-Print
He gave up photography for a decade or so because he felt it was an unsatisfactory representation of his visual reality. The image is now less dependable than ever with its unfixed and contested meanings, its immateriality, erasability and throwaway nature. The gulf between object and image becomes ever wider with the image becoming the thing.
Hans Aarsman, Waterhuizen (from Hollandse Taferelen), c-print, circa
He returned to photography with Photography as Antidote to Consumerism. In an accompanying essay he said:
Let us provide some resistance. Let art stop acting as a vehicle for commercial interests. And if art is incapable of doing so, because its interests are too closely tied to those of commerce, then we’ll do it ourselves. After all, everybody has a camera in their phone these days.
Aarsman currently works as a writer, in particular on photography, and is co-founder of the magazine Useful Photography.
What intrigues me about the earlier urban landscape work is its new topographic ethos. This is a modern image of the Dutch landscape that is in contrast to that of the old Dutch Landscape that is familiar chiefly from 17th century Dutch painting. Today the Netherlands is known for its planned, manipulated landscape as the agrarian function of the Dutch landscape is replaced by suburbanization, recreation, industrial and business parks and infrastructure for transportation.
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