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21/12/2008

Two Exhibitions

Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

Bert Nienhuis. A Retrospective

From 22 December 2008 to 22 March 2009, the Jewish Historical Museum will present the first major survey of the work of photographer Bert Nienhuis. This exhibition, planned in close cooperation with the photographer, will feature a remarkable selection of portraits and documentary photos taken by Nienhuis between 1972 and 2008. Many of these photographs first appeared in the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland.

Bert Nienhuis is a versatile and highly accomplished photographer, who over the past decades has produced an impressive body of work. Since 1975, as the staff photographer for Vrij Nederland, he has photographed countless Dutch and foreign politicians, artists, and thinkers, and his portraits now form a historical archive of inestimable value. Nienhuis has often been described as the best portrait photographer in the Netherlands, because of his unaffected style, his creative approach to mise-en-scène, and a sharp eye for subtle but telling details.

In the 1970s and 80s, Nienhuis made a big splash in special supplements to Vrij Nederland that featured his documentary photographs. Today, these sets of photos are recognized as classics. He was an engaged photographer, capturing changes in Dutch society in his photo reportages on employment, immigration and other timely topics. Through long and detailed study of the daily lives of ordinary people – an unusual working method in those days – he revitalized photojournalism. His subjects ranged from life on a campsite, or mass tourism on Mallorca, to the orthodox Calvinist fishing community on the Dutch island of Urk, or the emergence of a multicultural society in a working-class district of The Hague. In the 1980s, at the request of the Jewish Historical Museum, he took photos documenting Jewish life in the Netherlands.

The exhibition will include a short film about Bert Nienhuis by the documentary filmmakers Thomas Doebele and Maarten Schmidt, which will also be broadcast on Dutch television in early 2009 by the Joodse Omroep, a Jewish broadcasting corporation. The film was produced by René Mendel of Interakt.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the publishing house Atlas will publish a book entitled Foto Bert Nienhuis with a lengthy introduction by Gerard van Westerloo and graphic design by Victor Levie.

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Coloured images. Palestine photographed by the American Colony Photographers, 1898-1931

In 1926 and 1931 the grain dealer Arie Speelman (1880-1964) and his wife Anne Christine Speelman-van Vliet (1886-1967) took two trips to Palestine. During these trips they visited the photo shop at the American Colony (a religious community of American Christians), where they bought more than a thousand lantern slides of the Holy Land. These images were literally and figuratively coloured; literally in that they were tinted by hand, and figuratively in that they present an image coloured by ideology. In a sense, they show a dreamland, in which the tensions between Palestinian Jews and Arabs are almost invisible.

This unique exhibition features reproductions of fifty highlights from this collection, plus fifty more displayed in a slide show. They provide not only an impression of the Holy Land, but also a fascinating image of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Palestine: the city of Jerusalem, the country's diverse ethnic groups, urban scenes, and landscapes.

These lantern slides are examples of a very special photographic technique. G. Eric Matson and Edith Yantiss (who later married) started working with the American Colony Photographers in their teenage years. It was there that they developed their signature technique of colouring slides for the projectors known as magic lanterns, using water paint and India ink. This involved printing the negative on a glass plate and then skilfully hand-tinting it, often with hair's-breadth precision. Finally, they placed a second plate of glass on top, creating a slide for use in a magic lantern. The Speelmans showed the lantern slides that they had bought from the American Colony Photographers at evangelical events called Palestine evenings.

The American Colony Photographers also hand-tinted photos taken by other people, such as the Speelmans. A few such photos, which the Speelmans took during their trips and at home, are included in this exhibition.

The exhibition marks the publication of the book In the Footsteps of Abraham: The Holy Land in Hand-Painted Photographs, written by Richard Hardiman and Helen Speelman, a granddaughter of Arie Speelman who lives in Israel. The book will be available at the Jewish Historical Museum shop from mid-November onwards (€34.95).

Jewish Historical Museum
Nieuwe Amstelstraat 1, Amsterdam The Netherlands
Opening hours
Daily 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (also 25 and 26 December).
1 January 12 a.m.-5 p.m.
Closed on Jewish New Year (30 September and 1 October 2008) and Yom Kippur
(9 October 2008)

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