Goos van der Veen (Netherlands, 1958) has been working as a photographer since 1983.
After having worked for many years as a photo journalist and documentary photographer doing mostly commissioned work, around 2009 he decided to concentrate on his own projects. The first was The Skiable Landscape, a documentary series about the influence on mountainous areas as a result of extensive winter tourism.
His ongoing body of work 'Untitled (ink on paper)' is a collection of autonomous, printed photographs. Although the images apparently depict realities that existed in the past, they are presented without the usual metadata and hence there are little or no clues why the photos were taken. Instead, they rather seem to enjoy their ambiguity and they challenge the viewer to intensify his view, and invite him to dive into the little universes that the images present.
All visible elements equally contribute in shaping these little universes, as actors in a play. Tiny details - a special quality of photography: to catch little things that no painter would ever imagine to put them in his painting - have been caught by the democratic lens; they add to the viewer's feeling that he could step into these little universes almost physically, until he realizes that he is looking at both a reality and a fantasy, made of ink and paper.
In between he also made a portrait of Amsterdam, inspired by complaints of Amsterdammers about the ever-growing tourist invasion that plagues the old city. Although the series has a documentary nature and is by no means untitled, in the details you can still find the love for the enigmatic and the ambiguous.
The Enchanted Landscape is a another spin-off of Untitled (ink on paper), with which it shares its lack of context, answers and maybe even truth, but rather finds its inspiration in the perplexity one can sometimes feel when he looks around and becomes aware of the idiosyncrasies of his surroundings. The sacrifice is that it gives up a little bit of its ambiguous and enigmatic nature.
