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.)

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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.

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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.

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