Quatorze Juillet
Johan van der Keuken
Van Zoetendaal Publishers
French and English
Text by Noshka van der Lely
Concept and design Willem van Zoetendaal
Softcover
Sempuyu-style binding
64 pages
185 x 255 mm
2010
ISBN 9789072532091
Johan van der Keuken had already garnered the reputation of being a highly promising talent in the Dutch world of photography at a very young age.
To allow him to develop his talents further he was awarded a Dutch state scholarship to pursue his studies in Paris, as there was no film academy in the Netherlands at the time. At the age of eighteen he left for Paris and registered at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC). Initially he did not feel at home at the academy; instead of attending classes he preferred to wander through the city taking photographs, which resulted in the photographs published in Paris mortel.
At this point Johan van der Keuken was still a photographer first and foremost, but from the start of his career he was intrigued by the possibility of making manifest the dynamism in stationary images. He experimented with series of photographs, which he arranged to produce a ‘pictorial narrative’. He also combined dynamic, blurred images with static, sharply focused images, thus discovering how a chosen arrangement, a particular sequencing of stills, could accelerate their implicit dynamism or imbue them with a different meaning.
The possibility of suggesting movement via the static medium of photography continued to fascinate him, even when he concentrated on film-making after completing his studies at the film academy.
Besides the famous photo of the dancers taken on 14 July 1958, it came to light that the archives he left behind contained a great many negatives from his Paris period that had never been published. These rolls were shot on the same occasion as the widely known print and together they capture an enthralling dance scene. Johan van de Keuken then selected the most beautiful of these negatives, the photo that for him encapsulated this event in a single image. For this book we have opted for a different approach, incorporating what surrounds that particular shot, what went before and what came after, bringing this session to a close. This reveals the ‘cinematic’ quality of the scene, the movement it embodies. It is as if the photographer dances along with the twirling public.
About the Artist
Johan van der Keuken 4 April 1938 – 7 January 2001) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker, author, and photographer. In a career that spanned 42 years, Van der Keuken produced 55 documentary films, six of which won eight awards. He also wrote nine books on photography and films, his field of interest. For all his efforts, he received seven awards for his life work, and one other for photography.
(source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_van_der_Keuken)
About the Publisher
Willem van Zoetendaal (born The Hague, 1950) is a graphic designer who has been producing photography books since the early nineties. In 1994 he started publishing his own books, first under the name of Basalt (in collaboration with Frido Troost) and then under the name of Van Zoetendaal Publishers.
vanzoetendaal.com
