Jimmy Nelson and the usual Netherlands

Maastricht,

If we think about the typically Dutch clothing, especially in their headdres Precision and sensitivity, documentary purpose and poetic channel, has photographed both those necks rarely naked and faces in front, but hidden from hair, fabrics or mirrors, and highly evocative interiors of Vermeer’s rooms. Its purpose before one and the other reasons is similar: combining the spontaneous and the constructed, the planned and the accidental, wonders about the bases that constitute an image, where the limits of the photograph are found and to what extent this medium can reflect issues cultural and gender from a historical perspective.

This textile legacy is also present in the production of the British-Holandic author Jimmy Nelson, but with different objectives: to celebrate the originality and variety of traditional folklore of that last country and its roots. The photomuseum aan het vrijthof of Maastricht gives him the exhibition “between the sea and the sky”, composed of a selection of photographs, including large -format analog portraits, and two videos centered on about twenty Dutch communities; Its inhabitants have posed for him with the costumes of his festivities and with the fishing peoples, powder or fortified cities that inhabit as a backdrop. Each of the images is bathed by that nor -European light that many painters, including the aforementioned Vermeer, tried to capture.

Jimmy Nelson. Between The Sea and The Sky

The modes of life and more or less ancestral clothing, the survival of aesthetics that distinguish one and the other populations in front of the homogenizing currents, are the field of specialization of Nelson, photojournalist of profession: their last series Before They Pass Away (2013) and Homage to Humanity (2018), which earned him the recognition of criticism, were dedicated to indigenous towns that maintained unusual ways of life in remote areas, from New Guinea to Mongolia through Ethiopia. We can consider these projects as a history of their most recent look at the typisms of his adoptive country (Nelson was born in Sevenoaks, the United Kingdom, in 1967 and lives in Amsterdam since 1993, after a youth with a lot of nomad). Before materializing as exposure, the set Between The Sea and The Sky (2022) has taken the form of photolibro that summarized hundreds of images, among more or less intimate, individual and group portraits, and characteristic landscapes.

He works normally, especially for those portraits, with large -format analog chamber, reason that these scenes refer to the painting and are very careful in their details; References to Naturalism of Dutch painting live with reminiscences of contemporary photographic portrait.

The purpose of the set of its production is to emphasize the intrinsic beauty of human diversity and the global connection that entails the duty to preserve a shared heritage, and photomuseum, whose architecture combines precisely historical inheritance and recent contributions, wants to favor in the public that reflection that reflection on the global dimension of culture beyond geographies.

The debate could go somewhat further: a decade ago Stephen Corry, director of Survival InternationalWorld Movement for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, criticized the presentation in their works of the Indians Waorani from Ecuador, for not responding to the truth but to an accentuation of its picturesque channel; Nelson responded by pointing out that their purpose by photographing these peoples was not to make objective reports, but a aesthetic, romantic, subjective, iconographic representation of them. In the case of this Dutch project, that aestheticization survives, but the controversy does not: these clothing are part of the folklore and not of everyday life; To some extent they have lost identity Cariz.