Nederlands Fotomuseum: Johan van der Keuken Collection

The Nederlands Fotomuseum has acquired Johan van der Keuken’s photo archive. This large gift consists of negatives, slides and drawings. The archives have been donated to the museum by Noshka van der Lely, van der Keuken’s widow. Since her late husband’s death, she and her current husband, curator, designer and publisher Willem van Zoetendaal, have maintained and studied the archives. This has resulted in publications such as Quatorze Juillet (2010), Paris mortel retouché (2013) or Mise au jour: Photographs by Johan van der Keuken (2014), and thanks to their expertise, several exhibitions have been created in the Netherlands and abroad. “To build on this, the next logical step was adding the archives to the Fotomuseum’s collection, so it can be made accessible to an even larger group of interested people. Other people will be able to understand Johan van der Keuken’s way of working on the basis of the original archive materials, negatives and texts,” said van der Lely and van Zoetendaal.

The Fotomuseum will continue its research during the coming years in preparation for a major retrospective that will be dedicated to the work of Johan van der Keuken in the autumn of 2021. This exhibition will revolve around van der Keuken’s photography, the medium this multitalented artist always found his way back to. The meaning of the frame was a central topic in his essays about the similarities and contrasts between photography and film, the two mediums that were integral to his work.

On Sabzian you can read an interview (NL/FR) with Johan van der Keuken from Cahiers du cinéma and a text on his documentary Het witte kasteel (1973) (NL/EN).

Johan van der Keuken, Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 1956-1958.