Emiel van Moerkerken - Emiel van Moerkerken

Emiel van Moerkerken - Emiel van Moerkerken
Uitgeverij: De Jonge Hond, 2011
Hardcover, 255 pagina's, Nederlands
Afmetingen: 30.5x24.9cm
Zo goed als nieuw

In the history of Dutch photography in the twentieth century, the oeuvre of Emiel van Moerkerken (Haarlem 1916 - Amsterdam 1995) occupies a remarkable, rather elusive position. To name just one example: in the sixties he regularly supplied reportage-like photos to De Strijdkreet, the magazine of the Dutch Salvation Army, and at the same time he provided the playful 'nude magazine' Gandalf with stimulating images. Van Moerkerken was also the man who from the thirties to the end of the eighties (with a considerable interruption in between, mind you) used an alienating, surrealistic visual language in his photos, which was still un-Dutch in the previous century given the minuscule tradition in this field in our country. On the other hand, the first purely monographic photo book ever published in the Netherlands, entitled 'Reportages in licht en schaduw' (Amsterdam, 1947), largely consists of tight, monumental portraits of famous people who only occasionally look straight into the photographer's lens. Van Moerkerken's 'sitters' are serene and sovereign, there is nothing unreal or surreal about them. Add to this that the photographer was also a world traveler, filmmaker, film teacher, novelist and psychologist, and the image of the true, unbound 'uomo universalis' is complete.