Biography

Discussion

Cary Markerink’s work is diverse and multi-faceted. His commissioned photography primarily concerns architecture as well as artwork for art magazines, museums and galleries. In his autonomous work, landscape is a key theme. In his landscape photos, Markerink avoids images that reflect moods or an atmosphere. He portrays the landscape as the observable space in which we live.

As a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Markerink is considered to be a bit headstrong. His teachers, Hans Katan and Pieter de Groot, encourage his interest in and knowledge of art history. With other teachers, such as Jan Versnel and Cees van Heemskerk, Markerink’s relationship is less positive. He often refuses to follow the assignments given by these teachers, instead choosing to go his own way. Despite Versnel and Heemskerk’s negative opinion, Markerink spends his internship period in Suriname, where he documents the everyday life of the oppressed populations (black woodsmen and Indians), whose very existence is threatened there. Back in the Netherlands, these photos will be used by various (Surinamese) action groups and welfare institutions. Although he will eventually return to Suriname to work on reportage assignments for Dutch publications, such as Vrij Nederland, Haagse Post and NRC Handelsblad, Markerink consciously decides against furthering his career as a reportage photographer. He believes that many of the socially committed photographers of his day far too frequently –produce stereotyped images – in their effort to meet the media’s demands – that only serve to confirm (preconceived) notions. It is this critical stance towards social photography that leads Markerink to seek topics that are different. During his last years at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Markerink’s photographic production includes a number of abstract still lifes, as well as the series, Stadsstillevens (‘Urban Still Lifes’), in which he chooses the city, rather than its inhabitants, as his subject. Markerink by no means stands alone when it comes to his critique of social photography. Judging by a symposium held in Groningen in 1981, it turns out that other photographers, as well as photo historians, are voicing questions concerning the commitment of social photographers. This shift in attitude inspires photographers to seek out other subjects and gives rise to another visual language. As a result, the (urban) landscape and other topics are now becoming relevant.

Markerink makes a clear distinction between work done on commission and his autonomous work. With commissioned projects, he largely omits his personal interpretation of the photographic subject. In his architectural photos, Markerink captures the form and function of buildings in a clear and documentary way. His commissioned work in this area focuses exclusively on those architects whose work he admires, such as the architecture duo, Lucien Lafour and Rikkert Wijk, as well as Aldo van Eyck, Gunnar Daan and the recently deceased architect, Theo Bosch. He has also come into contact with other disciplines within the visual arts through the commissions that he has received, including Foundation De Appel, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Kröller-Müller Museum. All serve as an important source of inspiration for Markerink’s autonomous work.

In his autonomous work, Cary Markerink is always searching for a personal way to represent his subjects. In finding a visual form of expression, he in no way wishes to limit himself to any one given approach or style. Consequently, his autonomous work therefore reveals a diversity in his expressive images as well as those that depict a more neutral registration.

In his early days as a photographer, the AFK (Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, ‘Amsterdam Fund for the Arts’) grants Markerink the opportunity to further complete his series of still lifes as well as his series, Stadsstillevens. These still lifes are produced with simple materials, such as paper and cardboard and exposed with projections of reworked slides and available daylight. In these abstract still lives, Markerink’s aim is to express his feelings by means of the forms, composition and the play of light. His inspiration for these works are still lifes by the Czech photographers, Josef Sudek and Jaromir Funke.

Cary Markerink also has an affinity with work done by photographers assembled for a 1975 exhibition held in New York, entitled: New Topographics. Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. This exhibition presented an image of landscape that was entirely different from what was being shown in traditional landscape photography, where landscape is usually portrayed as a synonym for (the experience of) nature. It was the first time that photographers ­– including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke and Stephen Shore – showed still images of urban construction, electricity poles and the industrial complexes that shape the landscape. Moreover, they depicted their subjects in a way that was both objective and documentary. Markerink sees these photos for the first time in 1982 during an exhibition in London at Gallery B2. His series, Stadsstillevens, portraying fragments of street life in Amsterdam, reveals similarities to the approach of the ‘New Topographers’. By capturing the ‘unconscious’ experience of the daily landscape – the decor – Markerink provides an image of a city in still photos, where people reside, work and live, without showing the actual inhabitants themselves.

The series, Big City, demonstrates an entirely different approach. For this series, it is precisely the inhabitants of Amsterdam that Markerink seeks. He photographs them in places where people gather in large numbers, such as the Kalverstraat, Amsterdam’s main shopping street, and Central Station. In order to express the city’s dynamic character, he works with colour material, applies techniques such as flashing artificial light on daylight film. and introduces (motion) blur.

In 1985, the Rijksmuseum commissions Cary Markerink and Theo Baart to make Wonen in naoorlogse wijken (‘Living in Post-War Neighbourhoods’). Here Markerink chooses for the architecture of post-war housing projects, with subjects taken from various locations across the Netherlands. Using a 6×6 camera, a technical camera, and a panorama camera, he captures the neatly organised housing developments in colour and black and white. He experiments frequently with the colour material, by using overexposure and flash and by manipulating colours when printing. The subjects captured in black and white are presented in a more neutral manner. In a review in Vrij Nederland under the title of ‘Klein, knap en kristelijk’ (‘Small, Pretty and Christian’), Mariëtte Haveman expresses her critique of the random way in which the assignment has been carried out. She also questions the policy of the ‘photo commission’ in general, without disclosing her own ideas regarding what a good and accurate description of such a commission might be. Markerink also agrees that the final product fails to form a unified whole. He blames this in part on the fact that his photographs were taken at too many different locations.

As a result of the Rijksmuseum commission, Cary Markerink and Theo Baart are asked to document life in the Dutch village of Nagele by the Vereniging Dorpsbelang Nagele (‘Association Defending the Interests of the Village of Nagele’). Nagele was originally designed by the architects of ‘De Acht en Opbouw’ (‘The Eight and Construction’). With this commission, the photographers are given an opportunity to work together, this time limited to one specific location. Theo Baart chooses the lives of the village’s inhabitants as his topic. Markerink concentrates on the architecture and the landscape in and around the village. The photos are published in the book, Nagele [NOP] (‘Nagele [North-East Polder]’). Because Markerink and Baart portray their subjects in a documentary manner with a certain objectiveness and reserve, this series reveals a more consistent totality than the previous commission.

In Cary Markerink’s photos, the emphasis lies on the rectilinear structure of this space conceived by man. During a trip across America, he is fascinated by the ‘high desert’ in the West. After hours of walking in the hot and arid desert, this landscape almost seems unreal to him. In what he perceives as a metaphysical landscape, he aims his camera at the erratic sand and rock formations. Through their suggestive forms, these images often have erotic implications. In recent years, Markerink has been working on various projects – sometimes simultaneously – in which he focuses on trees, shrubbery and vegetation on fallow pieces of land. In these works he investigates the various possibilities of observing and experiencing a landscape in an image. Significant attention is given to the form of presentation in a manner that is different from his previous work. By combining the photos in diptychs and triptychs or in a block framework of different photos, the images as a whole prevail over the individual photo. Some of these diptychs and triptychs ­– taken from various camera angles – show the same groups of trees or bushes, such as with the triptych made in the French Camargue. This work depicts a wild and ravaged group of trees, as viewed through the eyes of an inquisitive hiker. The work, Botanica, shows vegetation on fallow pieces of ground in three photographs. Placed monumentally in the middle of each image is a berm plant in close-up. Another triptych consists of three bare trees, as well placed in the middle of the image. In both works, the emphasis is placed on the subjects’ forms, which can then be compared with each other. Such an approach is in line with a generation of contemporary American and German photographers who investigate the character and the mutual similarities of their subjects from a typological perspective. For Markerink, however, the social context of what he photographs is also important. A nuclear factory in the background, rubbish and garbage are matters that are kept visible in the image, indicating that his subject is situated in a modern landscape.

During various holiday trips across France, Markerink’s attention often returns to the Loire River. This has resulted in his choosing the Loire as his main focus in his most recent work, Album. This work consists of twenty-five photos. The images have been taken with a 6×12 panorama camera, printed as contact photos and placed horizontally, vertically and in a block format. To communicate the order in which the photos are to be ‘read’, the first photo in the upper-left corner of the block and the last photo in the lower-right corner are both in colour. The images depict the landscape along the river, often in a documentary manner. For Markerink, this work is a tribute to landscape and travel photography from the nineteenth century. Because of the unemphatic way in which photographers of this era portrayed landscapes, he sees this period as the golden age of landscape photography.

In Markerink’s landscape photography, there is no idealisation of the natural element. In his opinion, images of the idealised natural landscape do not correspond with the actual experience of our surroundings. He does not wish to be moralising in his visual language, as he puts it. While the subject lends itself readily to a critical stance, it is for precisely this reason that Markerink avoids instilling his images with a directly readable personal judgement regarding the situations they represent. In his work, a distinction can be made between Markerink’s ways of handling black-and-white versus colour material. When it comes to the former, he places high demands on the printing technique, requiring that all grey values be shown. In his treatment of the latter, he permits himself a greater freedom to experiment and manipulate.

The photography of the ‘New Topographers’ represents another approach in the theme of landscape. In the 1980s, an increasing number of photographers outside the Netherlands begin to portray landscape as the space that is actually observable. Through the influence of documentary photography outside the Netherlands and a number of other important conditions, such as the critical attitude towards social photography and a wider notion of landscape as ‘one’s own personal environment’, the cultivated landscape has also become a theme in Dutch documentary photography. Markerink’s series, Stadsstillevens, Wonen in naoorlogse wijken (‘Urban Still Lifes, Residing in Post-War Neighbourhoods’) en Nagele [NOP] can be seen as early examples of this development. He is as well the first photographer to work with colour material on commissions for the AFK and the Rijksmusem. Markerink’s recent work is more conceptual in character. In these projects, he focuses on the different ways to observe and experience his subjects.

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