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| Jan van Leeuwen was
born in 1932 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. A salesman, office manager, and
buyer for trading companies, his early photographs were images
of the products he represented. In 1986, he began to seriously
study photography and attended a workshop devoted to self-portraits. The
workshop greatly impacted his photography and from that point forward
the self-portrait became his main subject. A well-known Dutch
photo-collector introduced van Leeuwen to the cyanotype process. Hochspannung! (High Voltage!) is part
of a series of ten works. In these works, van Leeuwen is
not only the photographer, but he is also the subject. The
hands shown in this work is the artist’s own hands. The
series reflects the images and events the photographer experienced
as a young boy during the occupation of Amsterdam by the Nazis
during World War II. The
inspiration for van Leeuwen’s exploration of his experiences
and memories was thirty-five poems by a Jewish Dutch woman, Ida
Vos, who was one of four student survivors in a class of thirty-five. When
van Leeuwen read her poems, they “roused a storm of emotions
in me. From that moment on my self-portraits changed.”
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Jan van Leeuwen |
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