ART–DOCUMENTARY CROSSOVER
The rise of colour photography led to a blurring of genre boundaries, with artistic practices converging with documentary practices. Photography remains a key medium for showing how people live – in sometimes subtle and indirect ways.
Henk Wildschut, for example, documents the lives of refugees in Calais without showing the people themselves: we see only the tents and other structures in which they live. And rather than shooting interiors for his reflections on living conditions in Hong Kong, Michael Wolf captures the vast and alienating anonymity of skyscraper exteriors. These photographers use the visible world to convey meaning, as do Jacquie Wessels, with her still lives in car repair garages; Anne Geene, with her ordering of nature; and Ruud van Empel, with the utterly new worlds he creates from thin air.
