Geert Kooiman
As time passes by, and envelops all matter around us; only the spirit remains immortal? Photographer Geert Kooiman has created a collection of over 150 images conveying objects and situations in context with Famous Quotations and Proverbs; and in doing so explores the tension between the art of combining a photograph and the text. The meaning of the text is placed in a totally new perspective, and so everything becomes relative; and nothing in this life is what it seems. This series of photographs that show only objects dumb in their often absurd collection, and stage managed (mise-en-scène); but are given the word by the use of short quotations that are placed with them but explicit in this order. What seemed ’an innocent truth’, becomes an ironic echo of a still life that is as common as it is heartrending. A small drama of the simplest things, and the unmasking; or REVELATION of a historic optimism. A neat umbrella hangs in a tree with the caption:' The woman cries before the wedding, the man after'. A proverb of an incorrect life-truth, and suddenly the scene becomes a tragedy with an absent face; Where is the man from the umbrella, where does he hang? The drama of Kooiman’s objects rests in the melancholy silence of the loss that they each embody. We must realise that although no human being is present in his photographs, they may still be there. A summer- hat that lies somewhere lost on a beach, and footprints of nude feet that walk to the waterline; while Goethe comments; ' I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should'. REVELATIONS is a new way of observing the world. Glance at new interpretations 3
