Hans van der Kamp

It is summer and business is slow. Usually around this time I am updating server software or redesigning sites, but since I have been incredibly productive all through the year doing just that, I told myself it was time to fool around - with code. Recently I installed the gallery add-on for this blog and I started posting WebFinds until I realized that I still have a lot of drawings from the days when I used to illustrate my own articles in Dutch magazines, so I went through my archive to dig up some of these works. Most of the material is quite old and I do not see myself as a true artist when it comes to drawing or water coloring. I just had an awful lot of fun doing it. Most of the material was published with the exception of a series called Women in Pursuit.

As you may or may not know I have never been the greatest admirer of the female sex in general. I have my own personal reasons, but even from an objective point of view being born in the mid-1950s was not a good start to appreciate women. I can still recall feminists marching the streets of Utrecht, Netherlands shouting “All men should be castrated!” — over and over again. I was waiting for the police to make a few arrests but nothing happened. That was strange, because the Dutch already had fierce laws against discrimination and sexism back then. Somehow, feminists could scream, write or publish any sweeping statement about men without consequence, whereas men were dragged to court for sexist behavior almost every week. Somehow that did not seem right to me. It was not in the best interest of equality either and the turbulance was all about equality, or wasn’t it? Maybe it was about superiority? That would have been just fine with me. Only fools and madmen go for dominance and responsibility. Lately I hear a lot of women claiming that there would be no war if only women were in charge of the world. My response is predictable; “Let’s go for it!” or in the words of the late John Lennon; “Give peace a chance” and while we are at it — let us erase the name of Margaret Thatcher from our history books. You probably remember her as the “Iron Lady” who sent out a complete Armada of soldiers to conquer a few islands inhabited by a flog of sheep and a bunch of farmers who did not know what the hell was going on.

It is easy for women to say that they will bring peace to the world. Generations of women have voted for war without actual participation in the fighting. The author Céline saw his corporal’s head blown off by a grenade only to come home to his girl friend who was complaining endlessly that cooking apple beignets for the soldiers made her hair smell funny.

Many male collegues I worked with in the 1970s were sterilized for contraceptive purposes at the request of their partners. To me that was close enough to castration. Lately I often hear that these same men are undergoing multiple operations to hopefully restore the damage in order to live up to the child wish of their almost middle-aged second, or third wives. It makes me think that Freud was not such a fool after all with his theory on penis envy. To give a somewhat simular example: I was circumcised at age 16 and I still know how sex was like before circumcision. Circumcision is a mutilation of the body; it numbs the sensation in the top of the penis. Great work for kids who come too fast and tough shit for those who have a hard time getting it up. I am fully aware that circumcision narrows down the risk of cancer in the female uterus but good hygiene does the same. To me the whole concept is trivial to start with, because where I come from most women live to be at least 80, while men die a few months or years after their retirement. No excuse is good enough to compensate for the multilation of our bodies.

Most of my life I have lived in this stupid war between the sexes and when I die I do not want my name carved on a stone; I just want it to read “The Unknown Soldier in the Battle of the Sexes”.

Even if you hate this “Women in Pursuit” series; you will have to admit that it is a sincere document of a desperate man.

Women in pursuit - Gallery

Main Gallery Entrance (I am still adding pictures.)

As a young photographer I was often asked to bring my camera to family gatherings to make pictures. Like many people I have a hard time refusing, but when it came to printing the rolls of film my attitude became less considerate. Of course I had the very best of intentions, but there was always something else that needed to be printed first. So in the end aunts and uncles stopped sending me Christmas cards as a way of telling me they were disturbed by the fact that they had not received their pictures.

I had no real excuse. It is not that I disliked the dark room — I loved to make enlargements of my best work — but printing 10 rolls of film of people dancing and drinking or both was quite a monotonous affair and I often lacked the money to buy enough photographic paper to get the job done. I could have asked for an advance, but that would have been like admitting that I did not make enough money as a freelance photographer and at that age I was way too proud for that.

With the help of a friend I switched to digital photography around 2000. Most existing equipment was expanded with digital equivalents. The center piece of that new digital studio was a Nikon Coolscan 8000 ED with ICE technology, my new dark room and I am still working with it today. It had to be repaired once, but it is still humming on my desk.

I am using the 8000 ED to digitize my archive of negatives. So, whenever I have the time I scan a few sheets and currently I have about 40.000 digital copies of negatives. When I started a few years ago I decided to pick only the best of my negatives but soon I learned that was the wrong approach. My archive has a history of its own; it was once put out on the balcony in the rain by an ex who apparently had some unresolved issues to deal with, so a lot of negatives are in poor condition. Most of these images are “unprintable”, at least that is how I looked at them, before I started using the ICE technology to digitally remove sticky dust particles and scratches caused by hopeless efforts to clean the film surface.

A part of my past is now slowly starting to reappear in nice shiny 600 dpi files of about 60 Mb each. It is a miracle. Most of the material however cannot stand on its own. My best guess is that in the end I will have about 350 pictures who can in fact be showcased on my main photography site hansvanderkamp.com. Still, I find those other photographs, badly in need of context, very interesting too.

Monday I brought a camera to my son’s graduation to take a few pictures and I ended up taking quite a few more and I was immediately struck by that old fear of how I was going to distribute the photographs to the people I had photographed. I know there are plenty of options like posting them on FlickR, but somehow I do not like posting on these sites, certainly not if the files are quite large.

So, the best solution was to install a web gallery on my own server. I have enough experience with that, because most AmeaNet member sites are built around a robust program called PhotoPost, but buying an extra PhotoPost license to distribute 36 pictures seemed overkill to me. The only option was to use an open source gallery. I have done that a few times in the last 10 years, but it always turned out to be a very bad idea because of common security risks as sql injection and exploitation of the upload directories. And I do not like the way open source coders like to brag about a few hundred bug fixes in the latest upgrade — released only three days after you have installed the software.

So, I reluctantly installed Gallery2, an open source gallery package, thinking that my pictures were not going to be on the server for very long. It was a calculated risk, I figured. Much to my surprise there was a hefty security manual packaged with the program that made a lot of sense, so after installing a gallery for my son, I started installing another copy for this weblog, because this software can be integrated in the blog with a “simple” plug-in.

The random picture in the right sidebar is created by Gallery2. For the time being I am posting some Netfinds, my own drawings, a few family album pictures, and some photographs that do not deserve a prominent place on my main photo site.

When I started building websites in the mid nineties, everybody in the field was an amateur. There were few training possibilities, so we lived under the guidance of RTFM; Read The Fucking Manual. I was under the impression that I was one of the few photographers over the age of forty doing web design. Soon I learned that was a misjudgment. Many pioneers in web design were photographers.

Looking back on it, that was no miracle either. Photographic techniques were constantly changing, so most photographers were quite flexible. Most professional designers however seemed to be allergic to two things; digital technology and functionality. Much like fashion designers they were dinosaurs as far as computers were concerned. As a rule they used Mac computers, not only because they ‘looked better’, but because the software on these machines is idiot-proof. (This is by no means a denial of the fact that Macs are superior machines, that is — if you can live with the fact that there is so little choice of software to expand your horizon in a technical sense.)

If you have ever tried to carve a steak with a designer’s knife, or poured coffee from a designer’s can, you will know that most designers are absolutely deaf and blind to functionality. If you think this is an overstatement; try sitting in a Rietveld chair for one night, or better yet; try to embrace your partner in it like you would do in an ordinary chair. Within seconds you will find yourself in a classy pile of firewood picking splinters from your behind.

Few designers care about you or the functionality of the items they have designed — but you have to hand it to them; they are not too shy to use these products themselves. Just walking through the city one can spot designers from a mile just by looking at the glasses they wear. Whatever the fashion is, they always wear glasses that are utterly impractical and will look hopelessly ridiculous on photographs two or three years from now. To make things worse design as an art form has always been underexposed and underrated, so they act like arrogant, pompous, know-it-alls to compensate for their misfortunes. (Please bare in mind; it takes one to recognize one.)

So I would rather file them under ‘masochists’ than under ‘misanthropes’ and of course we could not live without them. Our society would be absolutely boring without design and it is very easy to ridicule a particular profession or any profession at all for that matter. I could ridicule photographers like myself even more effectively and come to think of it — I probably will one of these days.

With websites becoming more important every day, the interest of graphic designers who normally work for printed media is shifting towards the web. This resulted in better looking websites that do not function very well. Which is okay of course if the content of a site is of such high relevance that visitors gladly take a day off trying to locate the content they are looking for. Fact is that a site that will win an award for design is likely to have fewer visitors than a website designed by a code hacker who knows about compatibility, search engine optimization, and content navigation. Just look at the top ten of best visited sites and it becomes quite obvious that no graphic designer ever entered the building of the companies exploiting these sites. (With the exception of the logo, of course.)

At age 16 my son went to a school for graphic design that was slowly shifting towards a school for new media. You can imagine the chaos on a school where teachers were still deeply committed to printing, paper and hand-binding books, while in fact they had to teach action scripting, interface design and other multimedia disciplines. I have always adored my son for being a better person than I am, because he is an unlikely genetic mix of the best of his mother and the best of me, but I have learned to admire him even more for his ability not to become insane in an environment where insanity rules.

My son is now almost 22 and in the coming week he will graduate from this school and he is one of the first of a new generation who works with typography and design within a web environment. Although he did do some design for printed media, his portfolio is filled with designs for websites and other interactive applications. I feel pretty sure that the chaos he worked in during his education will have discouraged him enough to pursue a career of ‘websites only’. His interest in art has become broader and he will probably continue his studies sooner or later on an art academy to become an independent artist.

Whatever happens, I strongly hope that photographer-web designers and designers who are brought up to pimp printed media will slowly withdraw from the web to leave web design to a new generation of true professionals, so that in a few years the web will be wiped clean from the alienating web design that has become the trademark of graphic designers who think in ink and paper.

Most of my life I have had sincere doubts about decisions made by the majority of people. The front pages of our newspapers show us a list of disasters initiated by that same majority every day. It is not what we think that matters when we get a chance to vote — what we think is merely a compilation of facts and opinions fed to us by the media and I have worked long enough as a Dutch reporter to know that most journalists are frustrated novelists and the other way around. If we really want the truth about what is happening in our world today, we will have to wait a few years for a movie or a book opening with a legal disclaimer telling us that all facts are based on fiction.

Since there is no real alternative for democracy, I find politics very depressing, but I am a Dutchman, a European, maybe even a world citizen, so I try to make the best of it by mistrusting information supporting a cause that is too pragmatic or overly nationalistic. I never booked a flight to Iraq to check on the existence of weapons of mass destruction; I just found the story very hard to believe from the start, since Iraq had been under economical sanctions for too many years to become a military force to be feared. So, when the tensions were building up and the Americans on my site(s) started to post derogative remarks about Muslims and started to describe themselves as “patriots”; I spoke up about the matter time after time and I tried to explain that we “in the old world” have always had bad experiences with people who like to call themselves “patriots”.

There was a heated discussion going on - especially on the Hidden Archives forums. I felt I had to warn people and I did so in a language that is not my own: English. It is hard to have a heated debate with people who can use their own language to attack your opinions, while you have to translate everything in your head before you can post it. So I often lost my “cool” and started to randomly insult people. In the end most of the Americans left and my only result was that I lost 30% of my income on the member sites, because I was suddenly considered to be a communist and an anarchist. Please trust me on this; I am neither.

I do not mind the 30% loss on my modest income, because the quality of my life increased with about 60%.

In the end I just kicked out the last few Islamaphobes and went on with life — after being compared to Stalin, Hitler and a few other nasty people in history by the last of the Mohicans. Lately I have noticed that some of these visitors are slowly returning to the sites. I have no idea why, but I like to think that they have altered their opinions on certain matters to an extent that they are quite parallel to mine. More likely however they thoroughly enjoy the fact that I rarely visit my own community site The Hidden Archives anymore.

I am going on about this because there was a comment on my previous piece, posted by a nice American. She had a sane view on the problems we are all in today and somewhere in her text she asked: “But who is going to listen?”

Who is or who is not going to listen, is a question I have never asked myself. A question of higher relevance is: What is the destructive power of all of us being quiet while we know there is yet another genocide taking place? I have always felt that since I was controlling a platform with such an incredible amount of visitors every day, I *had* to speak up instead of being quiet.

I still recall that as a child I asked my grandfather what he had done to prevent the deportation of Jews. “Nothing,” he said and he turned away from me. Later I learned it must have been a very tough question for him, because during World War II he worked for the Dutch Railways and he was driving steam locomotives from The Netherlands into Germany. My father later explained to me that he was transporting cole instead of people, but still… He may have been providing for his family but that did not look too good one decade later.

Lately almost every American assures me that he or she is appalled by what is happening in their country, but I do not see a whole lot of protest marches, do you? And that Democratic majority in congress does not change much for the better either. Or have I missed a lot of news lately? What I do see is tension building up towards Iran and I ask myself what is going to prevent a dictator on the rise like Mr. Putin to lend a few nuclear missiles to Iran so that they can destroy the state of Israel when another invasion takes place. Maybe the fact that Bush has assured Putin that the Cold War is over? I do not think Mr. Bush’s word is good enough to prevent disaster and the Americans are so confused that they make ideal targets for hit and run attacks on a infinitely larger scale than is already happening. No nation or empire can go tear-assing around the world without perishing eventually. Our history books show no exceptions to this rule.

Somehow the responses of “good” Americans remind me of the “good” Germans during World War II. If they are really so appalled, why don’t they act up? Is it because nobody will listen to them while they form 51% of the voters? If that is a fact I can no longer see the US as a democracy. A Theocracy on a rampage maybe, but certainly not a democracy.