Exhibition 'Farming Folk - Adventures in the Countryside' in The Hague Museum of Photography
The furrowed face of an elderly farm labourer. The portrait of a proud Friesian horse. A still life of objects in a rustic interior. Timeless images, captured in the past by photographers like Adriaan Boer, Henri Berssenbrugge and Ed van der Elsken, and today by Bert Teunissen, Dirk Kome, Hans van der Meer, and others. Big names who have ventured to address the all-too-familiar subject of Dutch country life. In this exhibition, some 250 images created by more than seventy different photographers provide a visual account of the period that evokes many different themes: the development of a national cultural identity, the reshaping of the landscape, and changes in agricultural work. The images reveal both gains and losses, both the hard facts and the romantic vision.
The rural population is shrinking and becoming ever more elderly; once the main engine of the country’s economy, Dutch agriculture lost that position long ago; nevertheless, the image of a farming nation continues to cling to the Netherlands. It is hardly surprising that country life was a favourite subject of so many Dutch painters, most notably the 17th-century Old Masters and the artists of the 19th-century Hague School. Practitioners of the new art of photography also addressed the theme. They were drawn to it by its picturesqueness, by the light or – contrariwise – by the indisputably everyday nature of farming activities. At the same time, however, their pictures captured a distinctive rural culture that was already gradually disappearing.
By the dawn of the 20th century, Adriaan Boer, Henri Berssenbrugge and Richard Tepe were aware that they were recording a declining part of the country’s heritage. The same was true of Toon Michiels and Brand Overeem in the 1970s and ’80s. Remarkably, however, the latest generation of photographers are also addressing and reinterpreting this theme, as witness the atmospheric photo-reportages of young photographers like Loek Buter, Bert de Jong, Tryntsje Nauta, Gea Schenk, and Mascha Joustra. Clearly, the Dutch countryside is still rich in inspiration.
