it’s ‘queensday’ in amsterdam today, thousands of drunken people are streaming past outside along the canal, it is for me, possibly the least appealing day of the year to live here in holland and therefore a good day to stay indoors, catch up on the blog?
i was approached by dutch photography website/blog ‘photoq’ this week to contribute a piece to the ‘recommendations’ feature on their recently launched portfolio section, the idea is to choose a person or just one image from the available selection and explain your choice, mine was this image by ‘krista van der niet’, it was published this morning and can be found here
for the non-dutch speakers there’s a rough translation below:
her face isn’t visible but i would guess she’s roughly 22? in my fantasy she is pretty and good-natured? her thighs must have been painful afterwards, the majority of her weight is resting on the front legs of the chair but even so? it all had to stay upright?
so squeeze the knees together tightly and push the feet upwards to preserve the balance; a sterile, white backdrop behind and her head facing down, her breasts primly covered, then suddenly, click? it’s over
a magician’s trick, a charming observation, tongue-in-cheek, artful, elegant, clever, amusing and somehow ‘unfinished’, i noticed it straight away and it made me grin? an inner smile of recognition, that moment when you come up with an idea like this, go looking for the appropriate chair and then make it all happen? to take the idea out of your head and freeze it in an image?
the longer you look, the more you think about what you are observing? the lack of facial features, her pose, the attempts at establishing the right balance that must have been played out in that empty studio space, the relationship between form and function, beauty and so on? and i suddenly remember that anecdote about the obsessive chastity of Victorian England when even chair legs like these were covered with a tablecloth due to a fear of their inducing indecent thoughts? funny what an image can do to you sometimes? then yet another thought pops up: is it perhaps for sale?
you can see more of krista’s work here
