Hans Aarsman
Three Generations (pa)

For his Three Generations (Koen, Ik, Pa) Hans Aarsman used an ordinary pocket camera.

It couldn’t be less pretentious: a self-portrait in the bathroom mirror, shot with a hand-held pocket camera while brushing one’s teeth; a photograph Aarsman took of his son on a camping site, holding a fish in his hand; and another of his elderly father resting on a bed. Three generations of the Aarsman family – adolescent, grown man, and senior citizen – all recorded in a spontaneous, artless manner.

For Aarsman, the photograph’s power to convey the commonplace is more important than any purely aesthetic or narrative quality.

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.