Belgium – tom stappers

Nov 25

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what some people said about my house parties photographs

By Tom | photography

…Personally I was struck [by the image of]…young people showing a great sense of self-awareness of their own beauty. Christian Perring Ph.D., Metapsychology Online Review

…very striking and powerful… Susan Krane, University of Colorado

…lively documentation of the club scene in Holland. […] The heat is almost palpable. Gordon Baldwin, The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

…There are so many that I like (or should I say: that appeal to me)… Georges Vercheval, Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi (Belgium)

Whereas other photographers […] seem to be mainly fascinated by the extreme and the bizarre […] Stappers has consciously attempted to catch the deeper meaning of his observations […] giving shape to a subjective experience… Joost Meesters, Het Belang van Limburg, Hasselt (Belgium)

Mar 15

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dutch article “Tom Stappers: house parties”

By Tom | photography, street photography

For my readers in the Netherlands and Belgium who read Dutch here’s [was, TS] a link to the article from P/F Vakblad voor Fotografie © 3/’99, written by the late Herman Hoeneveld, about my house parties series done in the famous Scheveningen Club Exposure during the 1990’s. This well-published series is the first batch shown on my new website, designed by |r|ocketclowns webdesigners from The Hague.

The link is [was] to my agent’s website [this link no longer exists, TS 11/16/2009]. Several more series of photographs are due for web exposure in the near future, making my photography site grow bigger still. The bulk of my street photography is yet to come!

Mar 14

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text 3

By Tom | photography

Tom Stappers’ work in this exhibition represents the aesthetic reflex. The photographer looks at the outside world to see what all of us others no longer see, because we are a little tired and lead our lives absorbed by our own thoughts and sorrows. He rediscovers for us the visible reality and shows us how fascinating and disturbing, how beautiful it can be. To this end he uses an adequate aestheticising imagery which owes a lot to the adventure of modern art. We experience the same urban atmosphere. I’m not surprised to hear that Stappers is also a jazz photographer. The urban atmosphere – and in a way the atmosphere of the artistic live photography of the 1950’s and 1960’s with its graffiti and “la beauté du laid” [the beauty of ugliness].

Mar 11

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text 1

By Tom | street photography

“Observations, memories, associations, they all merge at the moment you take the picture. You don’t think of it beforehand. Intuition is far more important, since everything happens so fast that often it isn’t until much later, that you realise what it is that made you decide to take the picture. I think interpretation is more important than striving for objectivity or completeness.”

(part of a text accompanying an exhibition of my photographs about Antwerp, Belgium, at the Flemish Cultural Center, Amsterdam, nov./dec.1994 © Tom Stappers)