Wijnanda Deroo

Wijnanda Deroo (b. 1955, Zeist, the Netherlands) does not actually consider herself to be a photographer – she graduated from the art academy in Arnhem (now Artez) in the late 1970s having studied drawing and painting, and only later began to take photographs. “In fact, I am not really attached to photography. Like clay or paint, photography is just a medium. It is a matter of chance that so far I have found that I am best able to realise my ideas in this medium.”

Deroo made her name with photographs of landscapes and interiors from which people are absent. Around the time that she moved to New York in 1989, she initially turned her camera on that city, including on a stretch of no-man’s-land along the East River in Brooklyn at night. Two examples from this series are in the collection of The Hague University of Applied Sciences, and they immediately make it clear how desolate and insubstantial ‘the city that never sleeps’ can actually be.

Deroo also produces series of photographs on commission, one well-known example was made for the Rijksmuseum, where, over a period of ten years, she followed the renovation of the museum building. The resulting series of photographs can be seen as characteristic of her work – interiors in which no people are visible.

Initially Deroo took her photographs in black and white, but in the mid-1990s she switched to colour. This gave her work an entirely different character.