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Last night 291 stopped by Aperture to see old friends and catch the talk and book signing by Hans Eijkelboom.

Eijkelboom is an amazing and ridiculously underappreciated Dutch conceptual photographer. Aperture just published a book of his work entitled Paris|New York|Shanghai, which represents a selection from a larger body of work called “Photo Notes.” When I first saw some images from Paris|New York|Shanghai, I was a little bit skeptical–Eijkelboom’s work looked a lot like other typological work, and it wasn’t particularly visually interesting.

Since then I’ve done a 180. Why? First, I learned more about Eijkelboom’s past projects, which are intelligent but also offer a much more immediate kind of gratification. Some of my favorites include “In the Newspaper,” a series from 1973 in which Eijkelboom managed to appear in a photo somewhere in his local newspaper for ten days straight. In another series, “Identity”(1976), Eijkelboom had an assistant contact friends he hadn’t seen for years, asking them (1.) what they remembered about him and (2.) what they thought he was doing now. The final presentation included staged photographs of himself, acting out their images of him.

These projects–and many others that Eijkelboom has undertaken over the past four decades–make for thoughtful investigations of the ways that images are generated, spread and interpreted in a society. Moreover, they’re really funny. Even when they were being shown last night in conjunction with dry (but informative and necessary to anyone unfamiliar with the work) talks by two “Eijkelboom experts,” the audience couldn’t help bursting into laughter. When Hans finally took the floor, he was humble, intelligent, and fun.

That might have won me over, but the second real reason I’ve done a 180 is that I’ve grown to appreciate the work itself. For the past 15 years, Eijkelboom has gone on walks for two hours every day, taking surreptitious photographs of the first pattern that capture his fancy–one day, it might be “mothers and daughters shopping;” on another, “men in business suits eating lunch;” on another, “young boys in gangster rapper t-shirts;” etc. This decade-and-a-half-long project ends tomorrow, November 8–the date that coincides with the opening of the show at Aperture that accompanies the launch of Paris|New York|Shanghai. The book packages this work in such a way that it’s possible to look at one theme–men in striped shirts, for instance–in Paris, New York, AND Shanghai, all at the same time. It’s an ingenious little design, and acts as a visual example of globalization in action.

Two takeaways, then I’ll wrap up this post:

(1.) No Irony

One of the presenters pointed out–I think rightly, and Eijkelboom certainly thought so–that the photographs from Paris|New York|Shanghai are somewhat unique for their lack of irony. Even when we’re looking at something sort of laughable, Eijkelboom’s style is very non-judgmental. I’d contrast it with photographers like Lisette Model or Diane Arbus, who used their cameras to highlight individual weirdness. Even when Eijkelboom trains his lens on an unflattering subject, his shoot-from-the-hip style and the sheer volume of similar subjects nullifies any “quirkiness” effect that might begin to constitute a personal style or commentary on his subjects.

(2.) Pattern Perception

Going into the talk, I was already familiar with the themes of Eijkelboom’s latest work: issues of identity (as always), uniqueness, typologies, and globalization. But an extra dimension that really came out during Eijkelboom’s talk was his commitment to the investigation of his own cognitive process–he spoke of NOT WANTING to photograph certain “types” (”very thick men on 34th street” was his example, apparently from yesterday morning), because they seemed too easy or obvious, but HAVING to. His reasoning? “They were the first thing I saw.” In other words, Eijkelboom’s pictures are more than compilations of individual photographs with similar subjects; they are records of what patterns his mind latched onto most readily, even when he didn’t want it to.

Hans Eijkelboom opens at Aperture on November 8, 2007 from 7-9pm.
Above image ©Hans Eijkelboom.