Donkere duinen

The photo book Dark Dunes is about an enthusiastic amateur photographer who took his best pictures during the German occupation of the Netherlands. He was very meticulous in his handling of the medium of photography. Not only did he write down shutter times and aperture stops in the margins of his negatives, he also recorded the time of day, what the weather was like and what year it was: almost all between 1940 and 1945. He photographed landscapes, tulips, country lanes, and sometimes the cloudy sky. A photographer who looks through the lens without seeing the age and world that he’s living in. This series of negatives is questioning how photography can conceal the reality, instead of revealing it, and can be escapistic, instead of engaging.