Hans van der Kamp

I was looking at the statistics – 20.000 photo views in 40 days. I do have to add though that 70% of the traffic is directed to the Bordello section with a lot of nudity in it.

My urge to make pictures with sexual themes, as role-play, transsexuality and bdsm, is quite popular it seems with those who condemn those sexual preferences. Since the photographs have not been made in commission I try to ‘market’ them by posting links on other sites with ‘nudes’. Most of what I see there looks the same to me; mostly well-lit, well-photographed, beautiful flawless young girls Photoshopped into well-balanced, sepia toned compositions.

After adding my link, I am sometimes asked to send some works by email for a feature on their site. I am always embarrassed to send my photographs, because they seem to clash with all that sterile graving for aesthetics that the other featured photographers exhibit.

The women and the men I photograph do not have their faces cropped or hidden away in dark shadows. They are real women, real men, never perfect and they look you straight in the eye; sometimes in an exhibitionistic way, but always proud, even if they are 73, or 30 pounds overweight. I have chosen them for their strong personalities and their resentment of sexual barriers in fantasy. I am 50, I have no affinity with 20 year old “dream girls” whatsoever.
They giggle too much and leave chewing gum under the table.

Some call my approach to nudity pornographic. If that is so I gladly accept that I am a pornographer, because in my perception I cannot be an artist or a photographer by limiting myself to perfection of form; I photograph people and life is not a ballet restricted to those who have the perfect bodies and the pleasingly symmetric faces.

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I remember the time when automatic light exposure was introduced to professional photography. None of my colleagues at the illustrated weekly seemed to be very happy with that. They kept walking around with their Gossen light meters around their necks, looking like avant garde film directors.
I have always appreciated progress and I never protested any added functionality to cameras that could make my life easier.
The same overall resentment was felt when auto focusing was introduced. Needless to say that one can have heated discussions today with professional photographers who cannot let go of their beloved film.
Well, when the first digital Nikon came out, I switched immediately, because I had already worked with video still camera’s like the Canon Ion. That worked fine for me, but the resolution of the pictures was hopeless if you had printing in mind.

However, after five years of digital photography, I still find myself comparing the old negatives with the RAW or TIFF pictures produced by my D100. The quality is good, as good as any 200 ASA film in a conventional SLR, but it often does not feel like the real thing. So my judgement on digital photography is based on convenience, more than on quality gain.

Two days ago I changed that attitude. I was on my way to Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarktbuurt to take some photographs, when suddenly the sky darkened and I was forced to go into a restaurant. I thought I remembered something about a setting of the camera that could automatically assign an ISO value depending on the availability of light and I found it in the menu after pushing some buttons.

I kept looking outside but it was getting darker and darker, so I decided to call it a day and to head home instead. Crossing Dam Square I looked over my right shoulder and I was struck by two shadows on the wall. Not enough light I thought, but I pressed the button anyway.

While uploading the photos I did not even expect the picture to be more than a black thumbnail on my desktop, but here I was looking at a correctly exposed image.

Okay, a bit grainy in texture, but to make the same picture with a traditional SLR, I would have been forced to push the film up to at least 800 ASA to get the same result – with a lot more ‘noise’.

A friend commented cynically that I should appreciate the limitations of traditional photography to be prevented from making more pictures like the one I was talking about. Maybe he is right; the photo below is certainly not the kind of picture that I would have normally shot. Still, I am happy with it because it is a reminder of the day I stopped comparing techniques.

And I like a good tearjerker too, so why not have some Christmas sentiment in my work, for once in three decades of ‘the blunt approach’.

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