Harrie Blommesteijn
Hope and Dreams
22 MAY – 31 MAY

Hope and Dreams – Harrie Blommesteijn

Every person has dreams, and not just the dreams that come to us at night.

We dream about how our lives could be, who we could be, or perhaps what we would do if we won the lottery. These are dreams that help us look to the future with hope. But as mankind we also dream: we have collective dreams. We dream of peace, tranquility, freedom and happiness. We dream of a better world – which also gives hope. Many of these dreams are linked to events or inspiring leaders. In the 1960s, for example, the American President Kennedy decided to conquer space and be the first nation to land a man on the moon. It was a dream that gave the nation hope in turbulent times. ‘Go go go, you beauty,’ the crowd shouted in ecstasy, hopping up and down, at the 1969 launch of Apollo 11. The images illustrate the hope that the project gave, and not only in America. It touched people all over the world.

A second theme in this show is the series titled ‘La Vie en Rose,’ about Belgium during the Dutroux years. I made this series of kids playing on a car parking, against a decor of rubbish in one of the poorest regions of Belgium. They were playing ‘house’, or as we call it in Dutch: ‘father and mother’. And they played it pretty seriously, with small fights and then making up again. To me, it reflected how they lived at home, how their parents lived. It tells a story about growing up in a poor area, innocent and full of dreams, growing up against the background of that time, when kids were kidnapped and abused, or disappeared. Most infamous during those days was Dutroux. The photos of the playing kids are mixed with impressions of the rural landscape of southern Belgium. Part of this installation has been admitted to the Bienale of Venice, 2015.

I studied Industrial Design at Delft University and Graphic Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. And at the end I was most of all fascinated by photography. My photography teacher told us not to worry about cameras and technique but to make photos with our eyes, on the spot, and not afterwards in the darkroom. I’m still basically following that principle. To me, it’s all about the feeling, the vibe that I get when I’m shooting. Over the years this has become even more important to me because so many photographers were –and still are- getting lost in techniques and photoshop.

Some of my shots are like movie stills, telling a story. This show will also feature some actual movie stills, from a short movie that I made showing only the spectators at the launch of the Apollo 11, without a rocket in sight. I wanted to focus on the hope of the spectators.