“Without cows the Dutch cultural landscape is drowsily boring.” The cultural landscape? Or the landscape per se? I mulled over this sentence found in a gallery introduction to the work of Han Singels.  His Polder Holland will open on September 8 in Amsterdam’s Huis Marseille and be on view until the beginning of December.

In his late 70ies now, this photographer still traverses Holland by motorbike, seeing himself in the tradition of the old Dutch masters, capturing the landscape as they did with added points of interest, a bovine here, a dyke there. He used to do fabulous social documentary work for decades at major Dutch newspapers, and I guess, in a way, documents the landscape now.

Collection: Han Singels

 

Lots of talk in the museum world about how he  uses “upholstered” landscapes, with focal objects bringing different levels into the image. Typical quote from his gallery, Wouter van Leeuwen :

Singels plays a game with geometry. He creates depth and cutting planes and uses elements to make visual space backwards. Composition, tone, light and framing are of the utmost importance for the success of the photo.

 

Maybe so. I think just looking around is sufficient –  the Dutch landscape itself offers that very composition of planes, depth, light from the ever-changing cloudscape, as I have written about before.  That is what the likes of Paulus Potter, Albert Cuyp and Maris saw and painted, and that is what is astonishingly still in view, to be captured by the contemporary photographer – despite the changes in agricultural regulations, practices and other modern inventions.

The sky remains. So does the endless flatness, the green, the water. And, for now, the cows.

Landschappen met Koeien

Click on the link above to see some of his work. All other images are mine.

 

 

 

 

What remains as well, is my repetitive documentation of this landscape every time I visit, al though this summer things were parched and algae covered the canals….