Amsterdam based photographer Hans van der Kamp was born in Haarlem, Netherlands. At age 7 he claimed that he wanted to become a photographer. The origin of his motivation was that he contributed magic powers to the photographer who — in his child’s mind — was magically scraping off thin layers of every person he photographed to reproduce them on paper.
The only way to avoid all that voodoo was to stand behind the camera instead of in front of it.
After his 7th he would switch career options very often but at age sixteen he started to experiment with an Agfa Click and a dark room. Soon he was hooked to the medium. When he left home, he started working a daytime job in a photo lab and in the evenings he visited an art academy.
Van der Kamp’s main goal is to make portraits and many of the nudes in his works, often described as provocative, are portraits in his perception. Rarely one will find a photograph made by Van der Kamp where the face of the model is veiled, hidden or simply extracted from the composition.
