Breukel, Koos - Bergeijk

The best art comes from curiosity or science. Everyone who takes a seat in front of the camera of Koos Breukel (The Hague 1962) enters into a unique encounter with the artist.

Breukel photographs with a traditional camera that resembles the cameras that were used in the nineteenth century. From behind the tripod, he crawls under a dark rag to photograph times like this. Working with a similar camera means that photography is a concentrated process, for both photographer and model. Posing is intensive and at such a moment people are completely thrown back on themselves,' says Breuke. They are alone with their thoughts, questions and fears and that is the moment he is waiting for. Yet the introversion of his models does not create a distance between the subject and the viewer. On the contrary. Through Breuekel's eyes we look razor-sharp into the hearts of his models.

Commissioned by Rabobank Bergeijk Koos Breukel made a series of photographs in which the club life of Bergeijk is portrayed. Koos focused his lens on the actors of the theater club, the members of the Harmonie Echo der Kempen, visited a dog training, was present at the annual Kings Shooting and the Children's Carnival. As a series it has become a beautiful anthropological document in which each photo has that typical 'Breukel-intensity'.

The design of this book, emphasizes the unpolished directness of Breukel's photographs by using not only the negatives, but also contact prints. This also makes something visible of the selection process that precedes each portrait photo.

A separate part of this book is dedicated to the Pilgrimage of Horses in the neighboring hamlet of Weebosch, with a kind of intensity related to Breukel, photographed by one of his pupils: Amke de Kiviet.