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Dutch Households
Taco Anema, Familie/Family #5, Vreeland, 2004

Taco Anema »

Dutch Households

Exhibition: 7 Mar – 24 May 2009

Huis Marseille

Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam

Huis Marseille

Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam

+31 (0)20-5318989


www.huismarseille.nl

Tue-Sun 11-18

Dutch Households
Taco Anema, Familie/Family #9, Amsterdam, 2004

Two new exhibitions dealing with the theme of family in photography will open at Huis Marseille this spring. Along with the unusual and extensive collection of daguerreotypes from the Enschedé family, which includes the oldest known photograph in the Netherlands, contemporary family portraits by the Amsterdam photographer Taco Anema will also be on display. A new portrait of the Enschedé family has been done by him as well. With his series Hollandse Huishoudens (Dutch Households) Anema shows just how removed today's family portrait is from the stately, occasionally rather forced-looking group portrait of the past, which has been handed down to us on small and intimate silver-plated copper plates. Anema's group portraits are scenes, or tableaux vivants. An informal, socially and sociologically inspired outlook lies at the heart of these. Furthermore, these large-scale color photographs are curiously reminiscent of the idiom in family portraits painted in the early part of the previous century. Taco Anema's households are indeed more 'tidy' and certainly less caricatural than what the Dutch refer to as 'Jan Steen households'. But they are also warmer and of a more casual atmosphere—more convivial and Dutch—than, for instance, the highly formalized family portraits by German photographer Thomas Struth. They convey less tension than the masterly but complex group portraits of Rineke Dijkstra. Not only does Anema's work show a strong stylistic development of the family portrait; his photographs reveal the extent to which the Dutch family is changing—and has changed. Taco Anema (1950) has his origins in the tradition of documentary photography, which has become highly developed in the Netherlands. The development of Anema's work, from the 1970s up to now, runs parallel to this tradition. Following his study of sociology at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Anema decides to become a photographer in 1975. He buys the book Sweet Life, an absolute masterpiece by Ed van der Elsken, and a Nikon Nikkormat camera with a 50-millimeter lens. In those days a good photographer was a leftist photographer, and photography was an instrument for activism. Anema's first published series of photographs deals with the squatters' movement, particularly with the squatters' riot in Amsterdam's Vondelstraat. His black-and-white photographs appeared in the popular magazine Nieuwe Revu (now called Revu), then the second-best periodical (after the progressive Vrij Nederland) for publishing photographic essays. Around 1980 Taco Anema photographs and publishes regularly with the well-known documentary photographers of that time: Willem Diepraam, Bert Nienhuis, Hans van den Bogaard, Han Singels, Hans Aarsman, Theo Baart, Lex van der Slot and Hannes Wallrafen. On his own initiative he makes a number of trips to Poland in order to chronicle the strikes and protests taking place there, as well as the rise of the free labor union Solidarnosz. These photographs were published in the newspapers De Volkskrant and Trouw, and in the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer. To Anema himself, they signified the start of his career as a documentary photographer. Times change, though, even for the successful genre of documentary photography. The personal commitment of both photographers and newspaper/magazine publishers gradually takes on a more commercial slant, and assignments begin to dwindle. Various photographers devote themselves to producing photography books, others to new narrative structures, such as sequences or conceptual forms of photography. As photography begins to be regarded as an art form during the 1980s and 90s, the documentary photographers also shift their focus to new, spatial forms of presentation. The number of photo exhibitions then increases significantly.

Dutch Households
Taco Anema, Familie/Family #12, Amsterdam, 2007
Dutch Households
Taco Anema, Familie/Family #7, Amsterdam, 2004