Paul Kooiker
My work’s value doesn’t lie with the photographs themselves, but in what I do with them—in the process of sorting and manipulating.
Paul Kooiker via De Groene Amsterdammer, 2008
In his work, Paul Kooiker (1964, the Netherlands) investigates the act of ‘looking’. His photographs conjure questions about the part played by the gaze and the subject, the motivations of both photographer and viewer, and the photographer as a viewer. His work finds its true value only when seen in conjunction, since it’s Kooiker’s series, no matter how varied in form, that force the viewer to take responsibility for the act: the individual creative act of looking. It’s an oeuvre in which the creator himself seems strangely absent.
