Hans van der Kamp

Facebook friend Christopher Keeley posted a page called Tokyo Camera Style. A small collection of cameras hanging around people’s necks. It is hard to check, since there are no details on the persons owning the cameras but after 30 years of photography it feels like I can guess the characters of the owners behind those cameras. Just to give one example: I have never known an owner of a rangefinder camera who was not a neurotic and a perfectionist. I would even go so far as to say that photographers with range finder cameras have unhappy sex lives.

So I really was enjoying myself with Keeley’s page and I was struck by a quote of William Eggleston:
– I don’t think about what camera I should use that much. I just pick up the one that looks nicest on the day -
I simply do not buy that, or better I cannot imagine this to be true. I can see myself picking a camera that is best for the job, supposing I had a dozen laying around, which is not the case, believe me. So it must be a pose, I assume, much like the late Helmut Newton’s answer on what his photography is about: “Oh, it is all about entertaining models”.

I am strictly monogamous when it comes to cameras. For two years I worked with the Fuji S3 Pro and even named it Prima Donna, because of the poor focusing and some other unexpected electronic behavior one would not expect in a 21st Century camera. But I really loved working with it, because it always kept me on alert.

When I was finally able to afford the Nikon D3, I swore to myself that I would never take it outdoors and use Prima Donna instead, just in case I ran into a junkie who thought the D3 represented a few weeks of smack. But the Prima Donna ended on my shelves. After the D3 I never used it again. D3 is named Vera Donna (True Lady) because of its unbelievable technical achievements and most of all because its reliability under all circumstances.

Now I am carefully avoiding camera shops because the D3x has been out for some time now. That has everything to do with my budget. I know I will not be able to resist that camera if only to name her Ultima Donna.

With the D4 I will be running out of names in the Donna sequel, maybe then I will start naming them after actual people. If it comes to that, I will seek professional help, rest assured. :)

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On a forum for erotic art enthusiasts the following question was asked: What is your definition of “erotic art” and what separates it from porn?

It is a real yawner. As curator of AMEA I have been asked questions like this hundreds of times since 1996. Still, I woke up way too early in the morning and decided to have a go at posting an answer.
I am also posting it here for my own archive:

>>>>>

I would say erotic art in a sense is a ghetto, a walled territory, created by artists themselves to have platforms where they can easily show art that is rejected by those who claim to own the better half of morality.

In fact there is no such thing as erotic art. There is bad art and there is good art. It gets even more interesting when people start to describe themselves as “erotic artists”. Are those artists erotic or their works? Mostly neither. Are they artists? Well sometimes… Again, it all depends on the quality of their works.

A painter who paints landscapes and does the occasional portrait or nude, will rarely describe himself as a landscape painter. He will call himself an artist and his self chosen label will be accepted or rejected based on the impact of his works on others. If his works are crap, he will end up being addressed as a would be artist, unless we start to think differently about his works in decades to come.

Having said that and having denied erotic art the status of an art on its own, the distinction between porn and art becomes clearer, almost self explanatory. Still there is a lot of good pornography in art and a lot of good art in pornography. Again it is a moral issue. Artists who work from the depths of their souls as a rule do not have the least bit of interest for morality, unless of course their only goal is to make money. My personal experience tells me that I have better use for mediocre pornography than lousy art.

>>>>

I had to do this, although it felt like clubbing seals in a Zoo.

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