Biography

Discussion

In 1997, Taco Anema organised an exhibition of his own work for the ACF (Amsterdamse Centrum voor Fotografie, ‘Amsterdam Center of Photography’) bearing the title Monumentale achteloosheid (‘Monumental Nonchalance’)—a title that sums up his approach to perception and photography concisely. With a sharp eye for the nonchalant gesture and the passing moment, Anema photographs people in their mutual relationships with others as well as in their day-to-day situations. His choice of subject matter and style convey a mild, non-judgemental perspective on humanity and its place in society. Anema seeks to find harmony in an image, not just in the people portrayed in relation to each other, but also in the composition, with every element assigned an equal role. Taco Anema is a reasonable, optimistic, and phlegmatic person, who usually bypasses confrontation and drama in his photos, yet consistently photographs with compassion.

Anema is an autodidact and has made a profession of his hobby. In the mid-1970s, he graduated as a sociologist with plans to help build a new and better society as a teacher. Quite early on, however, he came to the conclusion that he had no talent as a teacher and that he would have to find another way to convey his social criticism. Anema took a class in photography at CREA, the cultural student centre of the University of Amsterdam. The class was taught by Hans van den Boogaard, who by this time was already a well-known photojournalist working for the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland and other publications. Through CREA and his close association with left-wing activist circles, Anema befriended other idealistic photographers such as Hans Aarsman, Theo Baart, Harry Meijer, Arjen Ribbens, Han Singels, Lex van der Slot, and Hannes Wallrafen. Many of them shared the same backgrounds as Anema, being former university students or amateur photographers.

For this group at this time, a good photographer was a left-wing photographer. He or she represented a clear political standpoint and photographed in order to support that message. The photographer was to stand in solidarity with those vulnerable in society and use his camera to raise issue with governmental authority and the existing social structures. The term applied to describe this photographic approach was ‘social photography’: documentary photography as a means of protest, intended first and foremost to persuade and secondly to inform. Social photographers in the Netherlands worked with 35 mm and fast black-and-white film. This gave them the ability to work flexibly and respond with great speed, with coarse-grained images and a darkroom-induced contrast being their typical stylistic traits. Specific problems addressed by Anema and his fellow photographers were topics such as equal employment opportunities for women, existing concerns about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, and the dissatisfaction with the lack of adequate public housing.

Anema’s first chance to present himself as a photographer arose during the squatters’ riots on the Vondelstraat in Amsterdam, where, in early March 1980, a major scuffle took place involving the squatters and the police. Anema’s own status as a squatter enabled him to photograph what was happening from the inside. He had their trust and was therefore allowed entry to locations were press photographers were normally denied access. His photos appeared in magazines such as Nieuwe Revu as well as a booklet entitled Even geduld, deze straat is gekraakt (‘Just a Moment, This Street is Squatted’), released in 1980 by Uitgeverij Lont, the publishing house of the squatter movement. Anema belonged to a group of socially impassioned photographers that included figures such as Paul Babeliowsky, Joop Blom, Maurice Boyer, Leo Divendal, Peter Elenbaas, and Han Singels. Their photos were spontaneous, raw, technically imperfect, and aesthetically inept. Anema provided insight into the group’s behaviour during an interview conducted several years later in De Volkskrant, stating: ‘(…) it [was] more about the fact that you were there, than that you took a great photo (…) I was given access to the Nieuwe Revu because I had contacts, not because of my ability to photograph well. I was a squatter myself and always the first to be there when things were happening. Indeed well-integrated but not a good photographer.’

At the time of the squatters’ riots, Anema also produced a series of photos that alluded to themes in his later work. In this particular reportage, he showed how squatters spent their daily lives, how they worked, studied, and lived in a barricaded building, while having to deal with continuous uncertainty and the possibility of an ensuing eviction. It was during this same period that Anema made several trips to Poland of his own volition, where the free trade union Solidarność (‘Solidarity’) had just been founded. Here too Anema photographed the strikes and protests, as well as the consequences of these developments for the everyday life of the Polish people, both at home and on the street. Anema was the only Dutch photographer in Poland during the riots that preceded the state of siege decreed by General Jaruzelski in December 1981. His photos appeared in De Volkskrant, De Groene Amsterdammer, and Trouw, signalling his breakthrough as a documentary photographer. Anema learned that the story was chiefly conveyed through the telling details in his photographs, such as people’s postures, gestures, and the directions of their glances.

During these years, there were very few options for young photojournalists like Anema to get their photos published. Newspaper and magazine editorial departments worked with their own photographers, including Willem Diepraam, Eddy de Jongh, Bert Nienhuis (exclusively for Vrij Nederland), Dolf Toussaint, Eddy Posthuma de Boer (Het Parool, De V olkskrant), Daniël Koning, Wim Ruigrok (both for De Volkskrant), and Vincent Mentzel (NRC Handelsblad)—people who started their careers just a little bit earlier. Greater opportunities for freelancers emerged at De Volkskrant in the mid-1980s, when Rolf Bos and Harry van Gelder took over the running of the photo editorial department. In 1984, Anema was one of the first outsiders to get an assignment from this newspaper, with a portrait of André Batenburg, leaving chairman of the managing board at the Dutch bank ABN AMRO. The photo was printed on a half-page, an extraordinarily large format for this time in the Netherlands. Anema’s name was also cited with the photo, contrary to the then accepted practice. Several years later, De Volkskrant placed his signature prominently—in facsimile form—alongside his portrait photos for the Holland Festival, which were published each week in the summer of 1987. In the early 1990s, Anema produced series on a regular basis for De Volkskrant in collaboration with the journalist Nicoline Baartman. In these series, text and image were treated equally, with titles such as Blikveld (‘Visual Field’), about watching television, and Kastsucces (‘Closet Success’), in which celebrities showed off their favourite piece of clothing attire.

During the 1980s, Anema moved in a circle of photojournalists and documentary photographers developing their own initiatives and conducting discussions on the content of the medium and the direction it was headed. Anema was among the first members of the press photo agency Hollandse Hoogte, founded by Louis Zaal, Dick Breebaart, Roel Sandvoort, and Simon B. Kool in 1985. During these early years, Hollandse Hoogte was run by and for photographers, with the illustrious Magnum serving as its model. Newspapers, magazines, and Hollandse Hoogte were to ensure both notoriety and an income.

In the magazine Plaatwerk, Anema took part in discussions concerning ethics and aesthetics in contemporary photographer. ‘Stichting Plaatwerk’ was an association established in 1981 by Hans Aarsman, Harry Meijer, and Kees de Graaff, in which photographers, journalists, and designers collaborated to promote and disseminate socially engaged photography. The magazine questioned the moralistic straightjacket constraining engaged photographers at the time. Anema felt more at home with a freer, less political approach to photography, which was starting to gain a more solid footing in the activist photojournalism of the early 1980s.

In 1983, Anema wrote a blazing article published in the film magazine Skrien and directed at social photographers. In his view, they needed to start working more independently and to stop preaching simply to their own choir, in other words, to left-wing magazines printed in small editions: ‘When you allow yourself to be used by conflicting parties, you end up waiting just as long for them to change the world instead of doing it yourself,’ wrote Anema. He suggested that social photography had become a product of a society formulated solely in terms of contradistinctions. Socially engaged photographers surfaced only in conflict situations involving the trade unions, the fight for women’s emancipation, and the anti-nuclear weapons movement: ‘(…) but then the struggle has developed in such specific terms that a great number of people won’t be able to identify with it any longer and brush the material aside with a weary gesture.’ Anema pleaded for a broader view of society and that photographers capture the processes occurring throughout society, recognisable for each and every individual. ‘It’s about alienation, hierarchisation, privatisation, the neglecting and exclusion of individuals, and so on and so forth. These are subjects that most photographers are unwilling to photograph as they would be boring. If this is the basis on which they ultimately decide in favour of other subjects, then their ultimate choice is to be described as rather dubious.’

In a certain sense, Anema’s article can also be read as an artist’s statement. With his words, he was taking responsibility for the direction that he had personally chosen—a course he would continue to follow rather consistently in the end, with Honderd Hollandse Huishoudens (‘One Hundred Dutch Households’) being a preliminary highlight more than twenty-five years later.

During the winter of 1984/85, Anema produced a photo series that clearly illustrates what he meant. In De wereld van de Haute Couture (‘The World of Haute Couture’), one finds no oppressed or underprivileged people. Instead, he provides a nuanced image of a fairly closed professional group. In 1984, Anema came with a proposal to photograph the world of Dutch haute couture for the annual documentary photo assignment initiated by the AFK (Stichting Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, ‘Amsterdam Fund for the Arts’) and the Amsterdam City Archives. While making a reportage for the event Amsterdam modestad (‘Amsterdam Fashion City’) in the same year, Anema came to the realisation that fashion was not simply a matter of taste, but rather a target-oriented billion dollar industry. Haute couture was the most obvious choice for the assignment, not only because of its photogenic character, but also because the project could be achieved more or less in its totality based on only five Dutch couturiers: Frank Govers, Max Heymans, Rob Kröner, Frans Molenaar, and Edgar Vos. Furthermore, Anema believed the fashion world was doomed to die out as a result of its isolated position and static character.

Despite the reserve of some of the couturiers, Anema succeeded in producing a complete reportage. The series depicts various people involved in the haute couture process while doing their work: couturiers, models, make-up artists, stylists, journalists, and clientele. In order to move about the studios, salons, fitting rooms, and hotels as unobtrusively as possible, Anema shot his photos with a Leica and available light, resulting in a shadowy combination of artificial lighting and daylight. The final product comprised coarse-grained photos in black-and-white that stand in stark contrast to the glitzy fashion photography of this era, likewise putting the image of perfection and beauty into perspective. At no point is Anema critical or ironic, though he does show interest in the chaos from which perfection and beauty arise. He flawlessly exposes a world closed to outsiders—as it turns out, a world which itself is made up of ordinary people, either focused in their work or eagerly trying on pieces of clothing.

Anema’s Enkhuizer groepsportretten (‘Enkhuizen Group Portraits’) from 1986 differed from his first reportage work like day and night, with sixteen portraits staged using a Hasselblad camera on a tripod, in a studio-like setting and colour. In a 1990 interview published in Fotografen aan het werk voor Randstad (‘Photographers at Work for Randstad’), Anema stated that newspapers and magazines frequently published his photos in another context than what had envisioned at the time he made them. This got him to start thinking about photography’s function, in the end doubting his notion that the medium was a way to change the world. ‘For me, the process is heading in the direction of no more using photography to make compelling statements. It’s something people look at. They don’t get any sense of a photographer being involved,’ he said during the interview. Acting like a director, he was finally able to influence the image for once. It was a role more suited to him, as opposed to that of a photojournalist, always rushing to get the latest news. Technically as well, Anema felt was never quite able to get the speed of 35 mm adequately under control. From his perspective, the blur that sometimes occurs in an image was more of a distraction than a visual plus. Anema still viewed staging a photo as being a bit like ‘honouring your own fantasy,’ as he told the De Volkskrant in 1988. ‘My fantasy isn’t out on the street. I’m no Kertész. I can’t photograph topics that are ostensibly unrelated and then portray them in a way that they still form a unified whole. I believe this is the only form of documentary photography, but unfortunately, I can’t arrange things in a certain order. And whenever I tried it, I still always turned to Walker Evans. You lay [one of his works] down next to [your own], and think: “Stop, go do something else”.’ Anema’s observation was by no means an obstacle: it actually gave him the freedom to experiment with photographic form.

Remarkably, Anema chose to portray groups representing a cross-section of Enkhuizen’s society, as opposed to the traditional group ties found in clubs and associations. With babies, wedding couples, church pastors, fishermen’s wives, gravediggers, butchers, and motorcycle riders—all photographed in a location that was carefully selected—the series remains surprising and impelling. In his images, Anema made emphatic references to visual motifs derived from film and painting. The portrait of motorcycle riders, entitled De Tweetaktridders (‘The Two-Stroke Knights’), is directly borrowed from Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean. The photo of church pastors is based on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with the starting point being idea of the table with a free chair and people sitting around it. The scene itself, however, was conceived more or less by chance, as Anema had no idea how many pastors would show up. While the photo was being made, a lively discussion ensued, with the only artistic direction involved being the two raised hands on the left. Anema later explained how the lighting for the image had been set up to students at the Fotovakschool (‘Vocational School of Photography’) in Apeldoorn. A spotlight had been placed under the table to light up the empty chair, and a grid lamp aimed at the painting: ‘This grid is a lamp with a kind of honeycomb that focuses the light a lot more, so that a gleam shows up on the painting. That gleam was put there expressly. When you’re walking around a museum and looking at those old paintings, you continually see these kinds of reflections. I found that it fit well with the atmosphere of the entire scene.’

For his photo assignment on behalf of the Holland Festival, the international theatre and music festival held annually in Amsterdam, Anema likewise turned to classical painting as a source of inspiration. This work established Anema’s reputation as a preeminent group portrait photographer once and for all. The festival’s organisers had initially envisioned a more documentary approach, similar to his treatment of haute couture. Anema nevertheless managed to convince them to consider his own idea: a series of ‘tableaux de la troupe’—made up of musicians, dancers, actors, directors, composers, theatrical directors, stage personnel, and cleaning personnel—shot in a theatrical setting, preferably off-stage. For his compositions, he closely examined paintings by Italian artists of the early Renaissance, e.g. Giotto, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, and Massacio: ‘They painted representations in spaces in which the story escaped me, and the distribution of surfaces, compositions, and light and colour schemes intrigued me immeasurably. Everything is straight, while perspective-wise it’s actually impossible. Each surface, in which there’s something to see or something happening, is equal to another surface. This is what I’ve done in the Holland Festival group portraits: unified the architecture and the groups with each other in a form that is always acceptable,’ as Anema told Leo Divendal in 1988 during an interview for the newspaper Haarlems Dagblad. These portraits are therefore more formal in character than the Enkhuizen series. Anema still had to improvise a great deal, as the performers were only accessible for a limited amount of time, but also because his ideas were not always understood. While the locations and stages were all precisely planned in advance, the lighting, composition, and colours were left for Anema to determine in accordance with his own fantasies and personal memories. Anema had not photographed the theatre, but ultimately made theatre of his photography.

Anema has regularly indicated that his portraits are indebted to the style of Paul Huf. Huf staged elegant and lively group portraits, with a natural flair and a feel for timing and surprise elements. Like Huf, Anema recreates reality in such a way that it retains credibility. But there are also differences. With Anema, glamour is virtually absent. Furthermore, Huf maintained a distance between himself and his models, while Anema’s dialogue with those he portrays, by contrast, has become much more essential to the creative process. In this respect, the sociologist in the photographer rises to the surface. Especially in his later portrait series—the series on prominent Dutch socialist figures and his series on Dutch families—he has intensified his approach, and that without forfeiting his artistic direction.

In the mid-1980s, Anema was not the only photographer with an activist and journalistic background to be inspired by Paul Huf. This is evident in projects such as the book De Verbeelding van Leiden (‘The Picturing of Leiden’, 1988), which includes staged group portraits by Anema, Bertien van Manen, and Hannes Wallrafen that have a narratory, slightly surrealistic undertone. Journalists and critics detected a new trend in Dutch photography: the portrait photo was undergoing a revaluation, with social documentary photographers taking increasing liberties. Because they had begun to doubt the social effectiveness of their photos as described by Anema in Skrien, these photographers were looking not only for new concepts, but were also turning to new forms of presentation. Technical and stylistic experiments resulted in a more unfettered way of looking, allowing greater space for their own power of imagination. They also investigated the characteristic traits of the medium itself. Just as Anema himself had experienced, this approach freed these documentary photographers from a visual and substantive framework, further stimulating them to develop their own strong points. It was a development marked the enrichment of socially engaged documentary photography in the Netherlands.

Anema’s work is similar to that of Hans Aarsman and Hannes Wallrafen. At the time, these three men were seen as the most important innovators of photojournalism in the Netherlands. Their individual differences are illustrative of the diverse pallet encountered in documentary photography from this period. They also share much in common when it comes to an intelligent analysis of the medium itself and the manner in which their observations are further realised in the image. In 1989, the three men were interviewed in the magazine Foto regarding their decisions to start working in colour. Although documentary photographers in the United States had already discovered colour photography by the 1970s, such a step was seen as rather remarkable at this time in the Netherlands. It was in that year that Aarsman had published his book Hollandse Taferelen (‘Dutch Scenes’), while Wallrafen was in Colombia working on photos inspired by Gabriel Gárcia Márquez. Of the three, Aarsman was most pronounced in his conversion to colour photography, which satisfied his growing desire to photograph as inexplicitly as possible. In the aforementioned interview, Aarsman stated: ‘In a good colour photo there are no dominating colour surfaces. Afterwards, you should have forgotten that you were looking at a colour photo.’ Aarsman’s statement actually also applies to the work of Taco Anema. During this same period, Anema began to stylise his portraits less and less, applying colour to his photos in a nuanced and matter-of-fact way. Anema and Wallrafen shared the ability to combine fantasy and reality in a manner that was meaningful and appealing. Both often subordinated the individual to the representation of a concept that concerned the group as a whole. The choice of colour versus black-and-white was intuitive, depending on the subject.

In 1992, Anema was asked by the Dutch History Department of the Rijksmuseum to apply for the documentary photo assignment of 1994, concerning the 100th anniversary since the founding of the social democratic movement in the Netherlands. The museum had a two-part project in mind. One part would entail a traditional reportage, following several individuals actively involved in promoting a social democratic political agenda at various levels. The second part was to concern portraits of various prominent socialists photographed in their own surroundings. Bert Verhoeff was approached for the first part, Anema for the second. In a letter to Wim Vroom, the head of the Rijksmuseum’s history department and the driving force behind the commission, Anema presented his conception of portrait photography distinctly. He also formulated the assignment’s substantive implications: ‘Because portrait photography is always about more than just a person’s picture and because the photographer’s perspective always resonates in his manner of portrayal, you are in fact asking me what my view is of people who represent social democracy. This is something I really don’t know quite as yet. Is social democracy made by people who sit at home with their feet in front of the fire drinking a cup of hot chocolate or is it fought out on the street and decided with royal dramas at party conferences? Should you photograph the person behind the social democrat or should the social democrat be eternalised as an actor in a historical drama?’ Anema argued for a maximum of freedom in the execution of his vision, as he would only then be able to let a small group of individuals representing social democracy function as a symbol of the whole.

The portraits were made in close cooperation with the politicians chosen for the project. In lengthy discussions, Anema tried to determine where ‘the red feeling’ originated. Each person was able to determine for himself where, how, and with whom they wished to be portrayed. In doing so, Anema involved them in the creative process itself, in an effort to fulfil his own desire that the photos would reflect the personal motivations of those in question. It was also his aim that all of the images would differ from each other as much as possible, and that the photos did not become staged depictions of the talks conducted initially. The photos were meant to be the result of the confrontation between the person portrayed and the photographer—not so much a story, but rather the depiction of an emotion. One example is a stunning, intimate portrait of Henk Vredeling, a former minister of defence. Vredeling wished to be photographed in a situation that conveyed a moment that was decisive for him during his days in hiding in World War II. Somewhat to Anema’s surprise, many members of the Dutch labour party, the PvdA, wished to be photographed with their relatives or immediate family. It was a preference he expected to come from the Christian democrats, who propagated family as the cornerstone of society, and not necessarily the socialists.

Family is the topic of Anema’s largest photo project up to the present day. Between 2002 and 2009, he produced portraits of one hundred Dutch families, subsequently presenting his photos in a book and exhibition entitled Honderd Hollandse Huishoudens (‘One Hundred Dutch Households’). For the exhibition, Anema had a small selection of the photos printed in a monumental format in order to show the visual quality of the images at their very best. The visual realisation of the theme of family coincides beautifully with a long tradition in the visual arts. Because the photos are combined with relevant statistics originating from the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (‘Central Agency of Statistics’), Anema’s book (containing all one hundred portraits) is somewhat scholarly in nature. In families, Anema recognises an enduring form of cohabitation, but one undergoing gradual change. While appearing to be a conservative institution, his photos clearly illustrate how the dramatically altered make-up of Dutch society has manifested itself specifically in the living room. To create a more varied picture, Anema traveled to numerous parts of the country. From a practical standpoint, however, it was impossible to get a representative cross-section of the Dutch population to sit for his camera.

The families are portrayed in the one space where everyone comes together, in most cases the kitchen, living or dining room. The interior provides insight into the family’s level of prosperity, lifestyle, and social status. Every member of the family (with the exception of babies and family pets) knows they are posing for the image. They also know they are being looked at by the photographer, and at a later point, by people unknown to them. Anema takes this knowledge and uses it to heighten the tension. He relies heavily on the situation he encounters but at the same time manipulates the scene according to his own wishes. While setting up his camera and talking to the family members, Anema observes their interrelationships and the position assumed by each person in the room. In doing so, he arrives at a natural composition, albeit one in which he directs every subject. To guarantee harmony in the image, all elements—people, interior, colour, and form—are equal. Anema is the visual director, but he still sees the taking of the photo as a joint process, with its success being dependent on his own fantasy as well as that of the family members. As there is almost always someone looking directly into the camera, he is indirectly present in every image. In doing so, he allows the observer to step into the living room, as it were. In his portraits for Honderd Hollands Huishoudens, Anema has succeeded in removing the ‘glass wall’ that often exists between the photographer and the person(s) portrayed in formal portraits. In finding suitable subjects, Anema had relied heavily on his own personal contacts. As a result, most of the people he initially photographed were well-educated, Caucasian families from Amsterdam. In the end, however, he managed to broaden his scope to other parts of the country and to include minority families willing to pose for his camera.

To this day, Taco Anema still considers himself to be a ‘documentary’ photographer: ‘I like photographing people the most. I want to tell something about the people I photograph to those observing. I’m always trying to vary the form in which I do this.’ Over the years, Anema’s approach has become freer. His stylised portraits from the 1980s have been replaced by a natural, informal, and reserved style. He allows the decor, the lighting, and the attributes to be determined more by chance than was the case in his earlier portrait series. He still stages and directs his photos, but in a visually less emphatic way, taking advantage of the available (day-) light, unforeseen circumstances, and the unconscious body language of his models. Anema’s portraits are not so much depictions of an individual’s personality, as they are images that illustrate a person’s role in a certain group, as part of a social context. He strives for compositions that communicate the significance and identity of the group concerned in its relation to society. In his photos, Anema presents an image of the general atmosphere, with the accent lying on his collaboration with the individuals involved. As he stated in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool in 2009: ‘The most important motivation is: manoeuvring myself into a situation in which I feel good. It’s great fun to make a beautiful photo in three hours together with total strangers, with their contribution being at least as important as mine.’

Documentation