Hans Aarsman

In the 1980s photography began to gain more recognition as a serious art form. Hans Aarsman (b. 1951, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) resisted the all too romantic ideas about artistic photography from the start, and as a photo-journalist, he experimented, for example, with deliberately not looking through the viewfinder, which resulted in crooked images.

In 1988, for his photography column Hier op Aarde (Here on Earth) in morning newspaper Trouw he travelled around The Netherlands for almost a year, using a large format camera to record the Dutch landscape in a neutral, documentary manner from the roof of his camper van. The following year the images were published in the photography book Hollandse Taferelen (Dutch Scenes). At the time, staged photography was the dominant trend in the art world, but Aarsman, whilst turning to colour and large sizes, used his camera in the documentary tradition.

Aarsman’s quest for neutral, unpretentious photography led him to look at amateur, and practical applications of photography. In 2002, together with a number of fellow photographers, including Hans van der Meer and Erik Kessels, he founded the magazine Useful Photography, in which all sorts of everyday photography were given a place – snaps that parents had taken for the family album, photographs that bureaucrats had taken for an archive, or scientists for research, or even images from roadside speed cameras. “Photographs that have not been obviously composed, and without velvety light. Yet these photographs can also be very valuable as a source of information, memory, or even as a source of inspiration.”

Since then Aarsman has become widely known for his weekly column in De Volkskrant newspaper in which he describes press photographs in the manner of a detective, projecting himself into the place of the people in the picture, closely examining the details and analysing what might have happened.