Photography: Ine Lamers
Text: Chris Dercon, Frits Gierstberg, Maaike Bleeker, Frank Vande Veire
Design: Gracia Lebbink
2002
Book of the month October 2022
The cover of the book Motives folds out and shows a photo of people on a staircase. The image is out of focus, as if taken from a great distance.
The book contains photographs of spatial environments, in the evening or at night, usually with people. You feel like you're spying on people. Were the photos taken by Ine Lamers? Or are they photos from security cameras? What is happening? Even in photos where no people are in the picture, you feel the presence of the human being, as if something could happen at any moment. They look like stills from a thriller.
On the back it says:
“I am looking because there is already someone else who is looking, someone whose looking has affected me.”
Urban space is central to the photographs and slide and video installation by Ine Lamers. This book offers an overview of her work from the period 1994-2002. The essays focus on the various photographic, cinematic and theatrical aspects of her work.
Texts in the book are by photo historian Frits Gierstberg, dramaturg Maaike Bleeker and philosopher Frank Vande Veire, who each look at Lamers' work from their own field of expertise.
Architects have deliberately created the urban environment with open and orderly spaces in such a way that social contacts are possible. An ideal image based on ideas about society as a whole, about the relationship between the individual and the masses. These urban planning principles have been applied in the capitalist, free West as well as in countries of Soviet socialism. Surveillance cameras were deployed to protect residents from each other. But the opposite is achieved: not protecting but controlling people.
The book was published by NAi Publishers on the occasion of the exhibition 'fotodocs' in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in 2002. The book, which is in the library of the Pennings Foundation, makes it clear that Lamers has been researching the relationship between ideology (socialism and communism), urban architecture and landscapes. During the finissage of the exhibition The Streets Are our Brushes, the Squares our Palettes on Saturday October 15, 2022, exhibitors Ine Lamers and Elian Somers will discuss this with visual artist Marjolijn Boterenbrood and art historian, philosopher and writer Fabienne Rachmadiev.