Hans Aarsman

When the apartment of Dutch photojournalist Hans Aarsman (Amsterdam, NL, 1951) was torn down in 1988, he bought a camper and travelled through the Netherlands for a year. Each week one of his photos was published in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, along with a diary-style text. This mixture of distant photos and personal reflections on both photography and his own personal life were made into the now-legendary book Hollandse Taferelen (Dutch Scenes, Fragment Publishers, 1989).

In 1993 Aarsman's Amsterdam was published, again a combination of personal notes and images, photographed in a similar detached style but now only in his city of birth. In 1994 he gave up photography. He sold his cameras and turned his attention solely to writing. He wrote a novel and various stage plays, among them a monologue based on the life of Garry Winogrand.

A number of photo books have also since been published, mostly with collected pictures sometimes in combination with his own photographs, such as Aarsman's auto-biographical book Vrrooom! Vrrooom! (2003). The book combines a selection of Aarsman's own car photographs with images from a variety of other sources and material from traffic analyses and market research on cars. Aarsman is the co-founder of Useful Photography (along with Erik Kessels, Julian Germain, Hans van der Meer and Claudie de Cleen), a magazine on photography without pretentions.

Aarsman, who is based in Amsterdam, now writes a weekly column in the Dutch daily de Volkskrant. In it, he selects one photo from the multitude that arrives at the newspaper every day, and provides his own personal commentary. These pieces, full of insight into viewing and 'reading' photographs, were published as De Aarsman Collectie by Nai Publishers.