Bart Koetsier: Parisian Wanderings
Bart Koetsier: Parisian Wanderings
CREDITS
Bart Koetsier (b. 1975), a Dutch portrait and documentary photographer based in Paris, loves wandering the streets, to just go out for a stroll – or what in French could be described as a ‘dérive’: an unplanned journey through an urban landscape in which you’d drop your everyday relations to that environment and let yourself be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters to be found there.
He teamed up with Margot Dijkgraaf, a critic and curator based in France and the Netherlands, and this resulted the book “Met Parijse Pen” (With a Parisian Pen), for which Koetsier delivered a fine selection of street portraits that he had made over the years; images that illustrate the stories of the authors, all in and about Paris – a city of luxury and beauty, but also of extreme poverty.
Margot Dijkgraaf highlights ten seminal Dutch and French writers who have lived in Paris and wrote about their residency. To just name a few: Patrick Modiano presents a lesser known side of Montmartre, Remco Campert walks us through the east of the city, Michel Houellebecq organised a tour via the Parisian high-rise buildings to the Sorbonne, and Adriaan van Dis walks you through the local immigration system.
Koetsier is a photographer, not a writer. But in all those days and nights that he has been strolling through the Parisian streets, just for the sake of it, he has been on all the tours as described by Dijkgraaf, and he has thus seen Paris with the same kind of eyes as all those magnificent authors who have reported on the lesser known and perhaps darker sides of the city of light.
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“The Outsider” – a collection of works by Bart Koetsier – will be exhibited at Polka Factory from 11 January till 30 January 2021
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Met Parijs Pen: Literaire Omzwervingen
Language: Dutch
Hardcover
192 pages
Boom, 2020
ISBN 9789024432486
€ 30
