Hans van der Kamp

First of all let me say how happy I was to see my last article on Rita Verdonk translated into Arabic by Google.
I have no idea who requested that translation, but it really brought a smile to my face. Blogging is fun, isn’t it? Once in a while you get to throw back some of the dirt being thrown at you by conventional media.
That Verdonk woman really turns my stomach whenever I switch on my TV, so Photoshopping that little poster — now all over the web — was a nice and creative way to avoid blood circulation problems. That is what blogging is about.

A few weeks ago I read yet another newsletter telling us that blogging is all about ego. I agree. Is that a bad thing? I have no judgment. Since I am not sending out e-mails to lure people into reading my blog, I think I am fine. For a moment there I was irritated, which usually means that the person addressing me has a good point. So accepting that fact I decided to make a list of people in the past who had done me harm in one way or another. It was a short list, but the names on it were impressive. Names that would really draw some search engine traffic. Now, that would really lift my blog out of the egosphere, wouldn’t it?

I even typed one entry, posted it and deleted it seconds later. Listing the crimes of one’s enemies is as personal as a choice of underwear. I have done that once in the past by writing a novel about my work for an American/Dutch company. In one of the more harmless scenes of the book I described a lawyer, known to represent the top of Dutch Captains of Industry, while eating bananas out of a prostitute’s vagina, and three weeks ago that particular scene was quoted in a large article about corporate swindle in the Netherlands. The poor, poor man. 15 years after the fact he is still being chased by that anecdote.

No, I will stay in the egosphere for a while.

When I was young my parents badly wanted to move up in life, so they bought a house in the best part of town. Prestige is the root of success, they must have thought. Whenever the Dutch elections came around, our neighbors started taping VVD posters on the inside of their front windows. I remember my mother nagging my father that we had to put one up soon, before everybody would start to think that we were *against* the VVD.

‘But we are,’ my father replied.

My parents were Roman Catholics and voted CDA. (Christian Democrats)

The VVD once was a party defending the interests of the top middle and higher incomes in a time that socialism was sweeping our little nation. Today a free market economy attitude is common on all sides of the political specter, leaving the VVD politicians cut off from their own unique selling point and forcing the party in a position where they have to play the minds of the xenophobes and the racists to stay in shape. We all know the recipe. It seems to be as old as this continent.

With every election I am reminded of that look of sorrow in my mother’s eyes when our neighbors started showing off their VVD posters. I never had a window large enough to hold a VVD poster for her, so I am posting one here. I have designed it especially for this occasion. It is featuring Rita Verdonk, the only Dutch politician who gets away with immigration strategies that would be considered ‘inhumane’ in most other European countries.

She has repeatedly misled parliament, was forced to back down more than once - only to step forward again at the next occasion, because ‘the public’ seems to adore her.

I would call the manipulated photograph of J. Edgar Hoover that I have presented earlier a rather bad cartoon, and that brings me to some thoughts on what we call ‘photography’ today.

Photo-manipulations are not new. There are examples of photographers manipulating their works that date back to the early days of photography. Some of these alterations made in the dark room were born out of pure necessity. With the long exposure times in daylight studios the braces that kept the neck and the upper body of the portrayed motionless often had to be retouched on the glass plate or the print. In the French postcards series of the beginning of the 20th Century pubic hair of models was removed with a soft pencil to avoid conflicts with the law.In the early days of Surrealism photo manipulations were used to add a new dimension to photography.

During the Second World War photo retouches were used for propaganda purposes. In the 1960s when photography was beginning to be accepted as an art form, a whole array of techniques was used to make photography competitive with painting. Printing portraits of children on thick canvas was just one of the many distressing examples of bad taste.Half a Century after the French postcards, magazine lithographers of Playboy started air brushing skins of Centerfolds to give them that plastic Barbie Doll look.

In 1998 as an editor in chief of the Dutch Playgirl I even ordered our lithographer to have the small potbelly of lead singer Barry Hay of The Golden Earring removed to make him more attractive as a centerfold for a largely female audience. Did I feel bad about it? No I didn’t. Potbellies come and go and rockers who are not touring tend to relax a bit. That is fine with me.

Only yesterday I came across a billboard of Sharon Stone promoting some sort of fragrance I believe and on the picture it looked like she had the skin of a fourteen year old, which was okay with me too, although I do rather see Jane Fonda in a Larry King interview telling the public that she will have no further face corrections, because she wants to finally ‘own’ her face. I thoroughly enjoyed her comment that most older American women are starting to look alike. Wrinkles are not attractive per se, but very young, almost transparent skins that show the veins underneath are not too exciting either in my view.

Lately I have run into a couple of debates with friends who manipulate every photograph they take in such a radical fashion that I cannot see why they used a camera in the first place. Whole backgrounds are removed and exchanged for new ones. People are added to the images or their position is altered. Colors and textures are tweaked to infinity. It is all possible thanks to Photoshop. The results are sometimes quite nice, but what am I looking at? Is it a photograph, a collage, or an illustration?

Maybe I should not care too much about technique because in the end it is the overall image that counts, but in reality I do care. I care in such a way that I get very annoyed when I see owners of photography galleries hastely proclaiming that they are certainly not against ‘new techniques’. They know very well that 99% of todays ‘photography’ is manipulated to such an extend that the images have little to do with what we have defined as photography for over 125 years. Still they want to be part of the buzz it seems, even if that means giving up on everything they have stood for during decades. At the same time more prestigious galleries and museums changed their attitudes in the opposite direction and are only cautiously accepting photography because their curators often feel fooled if they exhibit a photograph that is in fact a collage. I already stated that it is the overall image that counts, so what is my problem?

Well, I think if you add up all wall space of art galleries worldwide only 15-25% is (finally) reserved for photography and if that space has to be shared with the Photoshop artists who are promoted as the new masters then ‘real’ photography is back to where it was in the 1950s when 2% of gallery wall space was reserved for photography and I simply do not think that is a revolution to be cheered.

I am fully aware that I must sound like an old man who is quite conservative and probably I am. At the same time however, I keep finding rare and good examples of true innovative art based on photography. Most of that art is best presented on a medium that is as digital as the techniques used to produce it.

On this day, May 2nd, in 1972 J. Edgar Hoover, director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) died. He was noted for blackmailing politicians, but most people now think of him as a cross dresser and a homosexual. I think there is enough proof of the latter, but there are no pictures as far as I know of Hoover dressed up as woman. I started photographing gender benders in the early Seventies and I would have loved to photograph him. So, here is a Photoshopped Hoover to make up for that.