From December 8 – 11 we will participate in the Kriebels spectacle at Ahoy Rotterdam with a fully equipped photo studio. Visitors will be able to experience a real photo shoot. At this mobile photo studio there will also be an exhibit of photographs made in Moscow early November. This show entitled ‘The Russians Are Coming’ will be a premiere for The Netherlands. A larger series will be exhibited later in 2017.
One of my favorite series is the one called Aged to Perfection. Why? Well, I get to photograph women of my own age and that is fascinating on many levels. First of all; with a lot of years experience behind me I find it almost too easy to photograph younger women and men, because they often look so perfect and in shape that they are works of art themselves.
What is interesting is that I receive a lot of praise in the media for my photographs of ‘older’ women, yet I have never sold one single photograph in that series. No, that is not true, I sold one in 2006. And it is not just praise I receive either. In 2004 somebody threw a brick through a gallery window in an attempt to destroy one of my photographs of an older woman. The person who threw the brick was a young female who later claimed that her action was justified because ‘older women should keep their clothes on’.
On another occasion Facebook deleted my whole profile because of two photographs in this same series. They don’t do that if you simply post two nude pictures. That is called ‘obscenity’ by Facebook clerks. I was ‘charged’ with ‘harassment’ instead – which is a reason good enough for them to delete the whole profile instead of just the two pictures.