Photo: Bert Nienhuis
22 December 2008 until 5 April 2009
A Retrospective
From 22
December 2008 to 22 March 2009, the Jewish Historical Museum will
present the first major survey of the work of photographer Bert
Nienhuis. This exhibition, planned in close cooperation with the
photographer, will feature a remarkable selection of portraits and
documentary photos taken by Nienhuis between 1972 and 2008. Many of
these photographs first appeared in the weekly magazine Vrij
Nederland.
Bert Nienhuis is a versatile and highly accomplished photographer,
who over the past decades has produced an impressive body of work.
Since 1975, as the staff photographer for Vrij Nederland, he has
photographed countless Dutch and foreign politicians, artists, and
thinkers, and his portraits now form a historical archive of
inestimable value. Nienhuis has often been described as the best
portrait photographer in the Netherlands, because of his unaffected
style, his creative approach to mise-en-scène, and a sharp eye for
subtle but telling details.
In the 1970s and 80s, Nienhuis made a big splash in special
supplements to Vrij Nederland that featured his documentary
photographs. Today, these sets of photos are recognized as
classics. He was an engaged photographer, capturing changes in
Dutch society in his photo reportages on employment, immigration
and other timely topics. Through long and detailed study of the
daily lives of ordinary people - an unusual working method in those
days - he revitalized photojournalism. His subjects ranged from
life on a campsite, or mass tourism on Mallorca, to the orthodox
Calvinist fishing community on the Dutch island of Urk, or the
emergence of a multicultural society in a working-class district of
The Hague. In the 1980s, at the request of the Jewish Historical
Museum, he took photos documenting Jewish life in the
Netherlands.
The exhibition will include a short film about Bert Nienhuis by
the documentary filmmakers Thomas Doebele and Maarten Schmidt,
which will also be broadcast on Dutch television in early 2009 by
the Joodse Omroep, a Jewish broadcasting corporation. The film was
produced by René Mendel of Interakt.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the publishing house Atlas will
publish a book entitled Foto Bert Nienhuis with a lengthy
introduction by Gerard van Westerloo and graphic design by Victor
Levie.
For more information about Bert Nienhuis see background
