Resilience Food Stories

More than 250 invited guests attended the festive opening of the Good Food exhibition on June 11 at Pakhuis Santos, the new home of the Nederlands Fotomuseum.

Zippora Elders Tahalele, General and Artistic Director of the Nederlands Fotomuseum, opened the exhibition with a short speech.

Frits on the exhibition:

“The portraits and accompanying landscapes of Ruud are introductions through the image. The camera’s gaze is a balanced, calm, ‘natural’ gaze, which facilitates perception in such a way that it is as if I, the viewer, am standing there myself. The camera is positioned at a carefully calculated distance and height, the choice of lens excludes any visual spectacle, and the light is exclusively natural, present light. The subjects are at ease, at home or in a familiar workplace, which gives their narratives a natural and therefore authentic character. In the landscapes, I can imagine my own presence without much difficulty. I see people—positioned by the photographer as strategically as they are casually—standing or sitting opposite me in a friendly, open, and sometimes even vulnerable manner, telling their stories to me candidly and honestly (not everything they do succeeds, as it turns out).
As a result, this work aligns so beautifully for me with the demands and expectations of our time: human, unhurried, engaged, and open to dialogue.”

Carolyn Steel, writer of Hungry City en Sitopia gave a brief introduction.
Listen to a short excerpt of her all-important message.

The exhibition is designed by Mira Matić en Jamie van Lede of AMORV.
AMORV is headed by architect Jamie van Lede and spatial designer and curator Mira Matić. As two sides of the same creative brain, they combine decades of experience in sustainable architecture, exhibition design and hospitality. From zero-energy buildings and vibrant interiors to captivating exhibitions and inspiring events.

In Dutch the word itself reveals its meaning: Land and ‘Landschap’
That suffix –schap, indicates the state of something. like in vriendschap (friendship), gezelschap (company) or eigenschap (characteristic)
The ‘landschap’ is therefore literally: the state of the land.
Often, that state is deplorable, certainly today.
But in the photographs of this exhibition, we see what happens when we treat the land with respect: then a good landscape emerges, a state that carries and nourishes life.

Originally, landscape referred to the
COUNTRYSIDE, the horizontal world of soil and arable land.

From the 17th century, when painters made the land an object of imagination, landscape became something vertical: a canvas on an easel, AN IMAGE on the wall.
Where the painter worked with brush and paper, the photographer now stands with tripod and camera. Both make visible how land can be not only inhabited and cultivated but also imagined. The spatial concept for this exhibition is the synthesis of those two meanings: between the countryside that nourishes us and the image that tells us how well that land is doing.
We therefore do not place the walls upright, not flat, but at an angle, as a gesture that embraces both meanings.
In this way, a space is created where horizontal and vertical, matter and spirit, heaven and earth, food and imagination meet.