Biography

Discussion

Cornelis (Cor) Jaring has done more than just photograph the Provo movement, for which he is best known. His scope of activity also includes distant countries, the streets of Amsterdam, workers, the harbour, and various kinds of ‘expeditions’. In terms of content and form, his oeuvre is unified by the ever-present relationship between himself and the surroundings and people he photographs. Time and again he focuses consistently on those who live and work in the margins of organised society. The images he makes of these people are dark and shot from close up, with his contact to them clearly noticeable.

When Cor Jaring entered military service in 1956, there was nothing in his background to suggest he would undertake a career in photography. The Amsterdam port and the street were his home. His performances as a cyclist, boxer, and a painter were not bad. As someone who was used to doing whatever he liked, he was unable to subject himself to the strict discipline of the military. Eighteen months in, he was moved to the department of ‘welfare work’ within his military company. It was here that he first became familiar with photography, initially through making prints of other people’s negatives, but later through participating in photo competitions himself, winning each and every one of them using a borrowed camera. Due to his inexperience, Jaring’s plates were blurry and coarse-grained, giving them an ‘abstract’ quality that made them perfectly suited for the Subjective Photography of that time.

Once out of the military, Jaring decided he wanted to learn about photography by gaining practical experience. Working for a brief time as an employee, then independently, he learned to quickly focus, frame, light, and carefully finish his photographs. Together with Toon Huibrechts, Jaring went door-to-door offering to make portraits of children for a fee. In about 1961, he found employment as a press photographer for Persbureau Print (‘Print Press Agency’) on the Rokin in Amsterdam. This experience in finding news, observing, and photographing helped him to improve his skills as a photographer and taught him to use the talents with which he was born; the ability to feel at home anywhere, to keenly observe a great deal around him, and to take his own initiatives.

As a photographer, Jaring received his first public recognition with a reportage on the port of Amsterdam, exhibited at the Sociëteit De Kiekeboe (a photographic society). It was his first exhibition. The documentary reportages on workers and the alienating surroundings in which they live and work—entirely familiar to the people themselves—are a major element in Jaring’s photography. His amicable attitude and the ease with which he approaches others allows Jaring to bridge the distance that typically occurs when people feel uncomfortable in front of the camera. Form-wise, Jaring’s compositions—serene, taken from an ostensibly simple camera angle, and usually shot with a wide-angle lens—would most certainly fall under the ‘humane’ tradition of post-war documentary photography. The black and coarse-grained prints—though carefully exposed—are nevertheless more characteristic of his own day: the anarchistic generation of the 1960s.

From 1965 on, Jaring travelled across half the world, often doing commissioned work for airlines and magazines. He roamed about the Soviet Union, the Far East, Africa, and large parts of Europe, at times getting home-sick, experiencing exciting adventures and taking large numbers of photographs. In his travel photography as well, his numerous portraits of outsiders and other eccentric figures appear as if they were produced by a ‘kindred spirit’. Yet Jaring’s travel photography says more about his adventures, his attitude, and his curiosity in a strange environment than it does about the countries and people themselves. When labourers and Jaring come together in Amsterdam, he becomes more of the voyeur who enters another world to record his own emotions and adventures. Jaring is famous—and infamous—for the role he played as a photographer in turbulent Amsterdam during the 1960s. In 1962, he became involved in virtually everything that made Amsterdam into a ‘Magies Centrum’ (‘Magic Centre’) at this time, via Robert Jasper Grootveld: the happenings around the statue ‘t Lieverdje; the psychedelic hole that Bart Huges drilled into his own head in 1964; two years of the Provo Movement; Beatrix and Claus’ royal wedding; the Deskundologisch Laboratorium (‘Knowledgeable Laboratory’); the Kietschkonservatorium (‘Kitsch Conservatory’); De Insektensekte (‘Insect Sect’); the anti-Vietnam demonstrations; and the Stichting Nieuw Wereldrecord (‘New World Record Foundation’). Jaring was by no means the only photographer on the scene, but he was most certainly the one consistently present at the heart of all that was happening, despite the risks involved.

Both the left- and right-wing press in the Netherlands and abroad made use of Jaring’s photos. The Provo movement as well used his work in their own publications. Jaring never hesitated to work free-of-charge for those sympathetic to the same causes, nor did he refrain from making good money when publishing his work in various foreign magazines, including some that were less favourable towards the Provo movement. Most of the work did little to harm those involved in the movement, but Jaring’s publishing policy said a great deal about his position in the movement of the 1960s: he was much more connected to the mood of the times in railing against the sacrosanctity of the newly emerging welfare state, the value of things unorganised, and later initiatives involving nature, fun and jest like the Insektensekte, than the political philosophy of the Provos and other movements. With the Insektensekte, he was an active member; with the Provo movement, he was little more than a voyeur of all the rioting. In spite of—or perhaps because of—his understanding with the Provos, Jaring’s working style and photos helped to make the 1960s what they were: an era that inspired international infamy, anger, and astonishment, but that also spoke to the imagination. In the history of photography in the Netherlands, never before were the activities of a photographer, a socio-political movement, and the media’s interest so strongly interdependent.

Since 1971, Jaring has been an instructor of photography at the AKI (Akademie voor Kunst en Industrie, ‘Academy for Art and Industry’) in Enschede. Without having a single teaching credential to his name, he entered the school and paid for his students’ film with his first salary. He would always continue to teach his classes about photography by venturing out into the world. The first time was to ‘surround’ Enschede. In the spring of 1986, he even arranged an ‘expedition’ floating down the Nordhorn Canal on a foam-rubber raft. Jaring teaches his students in the same way he learned to work himself: ‘you’re nothing with just a photo. It comes down to dealing with people, gauging them, reading them. All of it together, your whole personality, the taking, selling, running around with a camera, your outer appearance: that’s what makes a photographer.’

Jaring generally works with a 24 mm or a 28 mm lens, which forces him to stay on top of things, to be at the heart of an event, to get so close to ‘his’ portrait ‘that you can smell their scent’. The same can be said for his reportage photography: the observer finds himself, as it were, standing directly in the middle of the riots.

Jaring’s work is typically very black, on occasion clearly blurred, and coarse-grained. This starts out in his negatives: in order to take advantage of the available light anywhere he goes, he works with highly light-sensitive photographic material. But it is also part and parcel of the time in which he grew up as a photographer: the black mystic-sombre style of printing—introduced in the Netherlands by Ed van der Elsken in the 1950s—became popular for political photography in the 1960s, as an expression of an attitude towards life that contrasts with the laid-back mood of the 1950s. Aesthetic and formal considerations make way for an ostensible anarchy in form: the content of the things themselves—the political message—is far more important than anything else. That Jaring improved the exposure when using photos from his Provo archive at a later date—making prints that were less black and more carefully finished—illustrates just how far he was able to take this purported anarchy. Jaring’s trained painter’s eye ‘requires’ that the compositions of his images are always carefully weighed. Cluttered images and people cut off at the waist are elements generally not found in Jaring’s photos, unless necessary. He still always has the option of honing the compositions in the darkroom, when unable to do so during the actual shoot.

With many of Jaring’s colleagues—photographers of the 1960s and ’70s—a certain degree of political idealism, a ‘holy obligation’, is not to be denied: this had to be evident not only in the photos themselves, but also in the way they were used. This was less true of Jaring. It was not so much the actual photos of the Provo movement that testify to this, but how he dealt with them. Jaring never hesitated to sell his photos, even to the Provos’ political opponents. The significance of this period for his career was therefore substantial. Equally important is the relevance of Jaring’s photography to the perception of the 1960s: even today, his photos play a key role in the visualisation of this period.

Documentation