Hans Eijkelboom

Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom (born 1949) is fascinated by the clash between the idealistic constructions and aspirations of modernism and the harsh fact of his own living environment. In 2008 the Art Foundation of Amsterdam's Academic Medical Center (AMC) commissioned the artist to document the Bijlmer, a district in southeast Amsterdam, which both he and the AMC call home. Eijkelboom took 12 photos every month over a period of one and a half years and displayed the steadily expanding series on a temporary wall at the AMC hospital. His photos capture the diversity of the area, telling the story of the place and the varied people who live there. This special album of photographs from the series is accompanied by an essay by art critic Hans den Hartog Jager. The publication also includes a textual collage by the photographer himself, which traces the turbulent genesis and development of the Bijlmer since the 1970s.

Dutch conceptual artist Hans Eijkelboom's work is very much in line with the deadpan, seemingly mechanistic note-taking of Ed Ruscha and Hans-Peter Feldman. In Paris-New York-Shanghai, Eijkelboom creates a witty comparative study of three major contemporary metropolises, each selected for having been the cultural capital of its time--Paris during the nineteenth century; New York, the twentieth; and Shanghai, the twenty-first.
This uniquely bound three-volume accordion-folded set opens up to allow the reader not only to view each city individually, but also to compare simultaneously the three photographic studies of each metropolis and its citizens. The large-format cityscapes with the identifying quirks of each city and the snapshot-style grids of their inhabitants soon reveal how similar one city is to another today. For example, Eijkelboom's grids of mothers carrying their infants in Baby Bjorns, or men wearing striped polo shirts highlight the ubiquity of many of our most intimate possessions. As Eijkelboom writes, "Globalization, combined with the desire of cities for visually spectacular elements, is leading to the appearance everywhere of city centers that look the same and where identical products are sold." With an introduction by Martin Parr.