| I grew up in a very Catholic region of The Netherlands. In my youth there were separate schools for boys and girls. At age 11, I had a horse accident that left me crippled for a long time. I still recall stumbling to school on my large orthopaedic shoes and crutches while young girls from my neighbourhood would circle me while dancing and laughing at me because of my handicap. To deal with these embarrassing situations at the start of puberty, I created my own world, a dream world where there was no place for pain or sorrow, a state of mind that only alienated me further from my surroundings. |  |
Hans van der Kamp
I grew up in a very Catholic region of The Netherlands. In my youth there were separate schools for boys and girls. At age 11, I had a horse accident that left me crippled for a long time. I still recall stumbling to school on my large orthopaedic shoes and crutches while young girls from my neighbourhood would circle me while dancing and laughing at me because of my handicap.
To deal with these embarrassing situations at the start of puberty, I created my own world, a dream world where there was no place for pain or sorrow, a state of mind that only alienated me further from my surroundings. At age 16, I could finally walk again, if with a small limp, and could wear normal shoes. In a month’s time, I turned into a normal, healthy-looking boy and, during this mutation, my parents moved to the more liberal north of the country where I had my first encounters with girls at school (unlike most Catholic boys I was an only child and had no sisters, so I had little experience with girls).
I was stunned. Not by their beauty but by the fact that their then fashionable mini-skirts showed the long, bony legs of girls growing up that reminded me of Peruvian Lamas. I was soon bored with those impressions. Instead, I was fascinated by my own “new” body—I could not get enough of that image of a normal boy who had cocooned out of a fat crippled one. The difference became the most obvious when I lay contemporary photographs beside photographs taken just two years earlier.
My narcissism got so out of a control that I wanted to enlarge the best pictures that I had taken. For that reason only, I started to build my first darkroom with an old slide projector that I had mounted to the wall and then began to make my first enlargements. As I ran into some difficulties mixing the right chemicals, I joined some photo classes at school.
So, I was using the photographs as a means of understanding my new persona, whereas I used to draw and write as a way of communicating with others. Somewhere along the line, these disciplines blended and I bought my first camera, a Russian Zenith E, the cheapest SLR around. The pictures I took were made to study and understand others as I had studied myself. Up to age 30, I photographed mostly men, and later on I focused on women with that very old fear of being laughed at and ridiculed in mind.
Now, as a middle aged man, I see that my pictures are described as “nudes,” “erotic art” or even as “pornography” but, in my heart, these photographs will always be portraits because of the main reason why I took them: I was trying to read the subject’s mind through the forms and shapes of his or her body, just as I did with my earlier photographic prints. Perhaps this is why some criticize me for a lack of glossy aesthetics or glamour in my works. I am certainly not emphasizing the beauty of the human body, but I like to think that I am a lot more open to the beauty of the mind as the crippled young man from my youth once was.
