“It was never my intention to be in the fashion world,” says Paul Kooiker, the Dutch photographer who made his name in 1996, winning the Prix-de-Rome with a series of colour photographs depicting a woman weeing in a forest, “but I like it.” While for much of his career he avoided the industry, building on the singularity displayed in ’96 with books like 1999’s Hunting and Fishing and Nude Animal Cigar from 2015, more recently he has been exploring what it means to photograph clothes, as a new show at Amsterdam’s Foam gallery details. FASHION, which opened last week, is a bold survey of commissioned stories, largely conceived over the last five years.
“I don’t want to make it more pretentious, this is what it is,” continues the photographer, alluding to the show’s forthright title. Despite his earlier unease with the industry – one he had supposed would constrain him on account of its superficiality – this is his second show using the moniker, albeit his first solo exhibition of this kind. “What happened in Germany was very surprising. That was the first time a museum bought images from my fashion assignments,” he explains. Having acquired thirty of the photographer’s works, last year Museum Folkgang in Essen opened Paul Kooiker: Fashion, exhibiting the images in dialogue with pieces by Juergen Teller and Cindy Sherman. “Of course, I cannot use [the name] every time,” laughs Paul, “I have to stop now.”
Once described by the editor and curator Brad Feuerhelm as occupying “an awkward liminal space somewhere between legendary filmmaker David Lynch and the surrealist Hans Bellmer,” the photographer’s practice leans into voyeurism, with his early focus on nudity and his sustained interest in presenting body parts as separate entities (whole subjects frequently lose their heads).
The crossover into fashion, for which he marries these ideas with the creations of his collaborators, only began in his third decade in photography. “Rick Owens asked me to do a lookbook for him, he always liked my work and sold my books in his shops,” he explains, “I didn’t even know what a lookbook was. He just said ‘do what you want, but please sometimes put a shoe in the image’.”
In high demand ever since, this year alone Paul worked with Glenn Martens, shooting a series of beach-washed nudes for Diesel’s 1DR bag campaign, while for Acne Studios’ AW22 campaign he captured Rosalía in full Rapunzel-esque glory. “I’ve got such a long experience photographing people – I always worked with models and a set – the clothes don’t change much for me,” he notes. “I focus on other things, the hair and the hands, because these play a big role, and I love when different body parts have their own life. That’s what I always did in my work, and that’s also part of my fashion work.” The German acquisition, he says, pushed him to interrogate the separation between his fashion work and the art he made earlier, while he sees the new show as providing autonomy to the commissioned images.
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Largely produced in black and white with a sepia filter, everything on the walls at Foam was shot on an iPhone. “I never make an issue about it, so people are always surprised on set,” Paul muses of his preferred tool. “Before that I worked on Polaroids and other different little cameras. What I like about an iPhone is it’s not perfect, there are mistakes happening, and you’re limited to a few things. That makes it so much fun to work with, it feels almost like part of my arm.”
His embrace of the imperfect is a core part of Paul’s practice, underscored by his unwavering rejection of convention, even in an industry known for enforcing its standards on others. “Beauty’s not an issue, I never like to make a perfect image. You just find your own aesthetic, and I trust my instinct,” he says. “Photography is a very realistic medium, which is also quite boring. I like to play with the medium so that it becomes a different world.”
Paul Kooiker FASHION will be at Foam gallery in Amsterdam from 9 December 2022 until 12 February 2023. You can buy tickets here.
Credits
All images courtesy of Paul Kooiker