Jannes Linders
After his graduation from the St. Joost art acedemy in Breda, Jannes Linders (b. 1955, Dordrecht) opened his own photo studio in 1981. The year after that he received his first big commission: photographing the architecture in the port of Rotterdam for a jubilee publication. His reputation as an architectural photographer was firmly established.
Initially his style was characterized by the absence of people in his black and white photos. That is a sign of his orientation to traditional architectural photography, where the long exposure times often made it impossible to record human movement.
Linder’s objective style made him ideal as a regular photographer to record exhibitions, for instance for the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, for architectural firms such as Benthem Crouwel, and for photo books about art in public spaces, for instance in Utrecht (1998) and Rotterdam (2001). In the mid-1990s colour, and people, appeared again in his work. He received many commissions from businesses and institutions, among them The Hague University of Applied Science.
In Jannes Linder’s photos, which are made almost exclusively in The Netherlands, it is as if the buildings, cities, landscapes and towns have always been there that way, and will always continue to be. This is not only because he avoids certain characteristics that would signal his work as contemporary, such as people whose clothing betray the spirit of the times, but also because he makes passionate use of what photographic history has produced: “In my photographs I see both the qualities and the limitations of a highly developed vision and technology, of context in architecture and of the changing influence of time, politics and economy. I make passionate use of traditions and clichés, and the discoveries from my own investigations.”