Hans Eijkelboom

(b. 1949, Arnhem, The Netherlands; lives and works in Amsterdam)

The Street & Modern Life, 2015
Video film, 30’
Courtesy of the artist

The Dutch conceptual photographer Hans Eijkelboom has spent a quarter of a century photographing ordinary people in the shopping streets of the world capitals. New York, Paris, and Shanghai are almost indistinguishable through the lens of his camera, and the dizzying variety of mass-market clothing creates fascinating chains of analogies. Operating with huge volumes of photographic data, Eijkelboom carefully and ironically arranges it, creating a monumental encyclopedia of “people of the twenty-first century,” evidence of the visual abundance of the epoch of global capitalism, which extols difference yet is frighteningly monotonous, something which can be seen by the astute observer. Eijkelboom’s response to classical street photography, which is obsessed with catching the right moment, is the serial method and his interest in the repeated, banal, and typical. At the beginning of his artistic career, Eijkelboom found fame with his triptych The Three Communists (1975), portraying himself as a Marxist, a Leninist, and a Maoist. Even then, his interest in clothing as a way of forming identity was apparent. A series of stopped moments, passing by like people in the street, suggests the indifferent nature of this detached photographic process, but also brings to mind a comparison of Eijkelboom’s method with the humanistic approach of August Sander, the author of the photobook Face of Our Time, which was banned by the Nazis.