Capturing Amsterdam’s
Decisive Moment
A Photographer and His Camera View
Vermeer, the Tulips, and a Great City
By Richard Ross | June 11, 2023
“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” – Garry Winogrand
Winogrand visited UCSB in 1979. He shot two rolls of film walking from the Art Department to the UCEN for a cup of coffee. When he died, in 1984, he left 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film.
Film was the photosensitized support where images were “captured” and chemically processed. The rolls represented 90,000 separate moments, frames, ideas. But he still hoped to capture something unique, something memorable in his constant ballet movement of picture taking.
I grew up with a camera and existed in a world where the camera was a window into something special. The image was something curated and precious. It took time. the image didn’t show on an LCD screen. Pressing the shutter release was an act of pure faith.
Forty years ago I stood in a dark, abandoned museum of natural history in Paris and opened a shutter for 16 minutes with a Hasselblad (camera) on a tripod and waited, and prayed. There was no iPhone, Walkman, Discman. There was silence, darkness and time. I returned home, and printed the image. It still is the only image of my own hanging on my wall at home. Those decades past—images were printed, not posted, not shared.
I exposed, prayed, printed and savored.
Now I stand in front of a Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is a space of magic and wonder. The work I did was always based in light as the subject rather than the focus of celebrity. Vermeer was my friend at an early age and this exhibition was not to be missed.
A swarm of visitors vie for the precious moments when they can stand before these 17th century master works. 450,000 tickets went on sale and were gone within days. A pair of e-tickets sold online for $2,700+. Vermeer is the rock star of the Dutch gilded Age. He created that ray of soft light –that moment of stillness and reflection. The photograph captures an illusion of a specific time and space. It can make the photographer and the viewer omnipotent and somehow invisible to the subject in a magical way. The subject, the painting, is undisturbed by the artist’s presence–unaware of his gaze. Almost a magical or religious superpower–this action defines Vermeer.
An earlier photographer Cartier Bresson described this instant as the “decisive moment.” The contemporary museum goer uses the time to capture the image on a cell phone and then turns and takes a selfie– capturing themselves with the woman with a water jug…perfection of atmospheric Dutch Renaissance–window light streaming in from the left. The painting a woman gazes out the window…out of the frame of the painting while the cell phone captures (and color corrects) the photographer in the foreground 400 years later.
The more I traveled–decades as a photographer, the more I learned about myself as well as the world. It was never about “taking” images. It was always about “being” rather than “doing.” Having a coffee or a wine at four was more important than making sure I saw it all. By trying to not miss anything, you would miss everything.
Working as an artist, the world is always viewed through a normal lens, but there is also the impetus to look at 180 degrees. What are you missing when you don’t look behind you? Challenge the norm, the historic, perhaps the photographer is the star of their own movie and art history is set decoration … .a souvenir. I try to reorient my thinking.
The photograph is not only what is in the frame, equally it is what is omitted. I can capture an instant of symmetry and solitude and the illusion that this world can be retained. The world is so chaotic today, but perhaps it was as intimidating in 1640 with the promise, but violence of colonial expansion of everyday life?
Of the 37 surviving paintings (of a possible 60 that are speculated to have been actually created) 28 are now in Amsterdam. Vermeer painted the elegant contemplative instants that have resonated through the centuries but what is excluded is his 14 children and his wife shouting “When will you ever come to dinner and can you do something to help with these kids rather than simply engage in their creation?” He had to spend a great deal of his time as an art dealer to put food on the table of this brood. Perhaps the craft of painting, his act of creation, his legacy–was a side-hustle.
The physical oil palette of the 17th century was not easily obtained. We might think of ordering something from Amazon. Dial it back 400 years and the material actually came from the Amazon or mines in Asia or somehow the brutal labor of enslaved people in the new worlds that the Dutch were conquering.
But here I stand. My own history, Vermeer, my environment and the life around me, cell phone camera and all.
Maybe the camera should be a witness or testimony of one’s own presence?
I shouldn’t be critical of all the other cell phone photographers. I should be accepting of everyone’s journey. Here is Vermeer. I will breathe and share this rare space for an hour. I will make it count, but let me take one or two pictures first. Maybe a selfie.
Amsterdam is a first stop for many post college European pilgrimage. It was for me and I wanted to share as the world again welcomed visitors. Perhaps it was the openness of the weed cafes or the doll house facades of sex workers in the Red Light District. It especially appealed to the post adolescent children of the 60s-70s. Now I revisit, but the term 70s takes on a new meaning. I am seventy plus. The legal weed and sex are still there, but I view them as nostalgia rather than excitement.
“I photograph to see what the world looks like with me in the image.”
Or as Popeye says: “I yam what I yam” Live and let live. One of the big lessons of travel. And in the post pandemic world we have to alter and adjust even more.
My little Santa Barbara garden is filled with tulips, a ritual in planting since I first visited a lifetime ago. So in homage, we visit the Keukenhof Gardens, an hour from the city. The rivers of tulips seem to mimic the canals of Amsterdam. The colors defy description. Hard edge acrylic paintings laid on the ground would look pale and desaturated compared to the intensity of nature.
The crowds of people seem to flow around the static flowers. If I chose to make the memory serene–I could disappear the hoards. We are moments away from “Hey Siri–take out people from pictures.” AI meets Photoshop and I can silence, stillness and contemplate.
Happily I join the world of documenting the tulips, simultaneously natural yet audacious colors. The Kuchendorf Garden, the largest tulip garden in the world, has been closed for three years. Finally March 2023 it is open but only for a few months to celebrate the blooms–and do they deliver. Enthusiastic crowds pile into buses and trains and defy the misty, almost rainy morning. The food is lackluster but the caretakers are dealing with hoards of pent up demand and seem to have run out of everything but tulips. Just being there has classical music playing in your mind. It is masses of flowers forming a history of a country and an anecdote to greed and scarcity.
In 1637, a tulip would sell for the cost of a mansion on the Grand Canal. They were dramatic in their saturation, and often changing with virus and mutation. Tulips were also part of the new “global” economy that allowed for the introduction of potatoes, green and red peppers, tomatoes and Jerusalem artichokes. But the tulip bubble, tulip mania, was unique, a lesson to subsequent economic cycles. But today, there are more than 800 varieties and not only breath but depth of color. They go on as far as you can see. Brush strokes on a landscape. Perfect to document, and to record yourself mid palette of color.
Now I wonder for whom I photograph. Every site has been documented, posted and liked. Maybe I am doing my own selfie to show my children, my grandchildren.
“Go two bridges and turn left,” “Past the third canal, after the main Amstel” Amsterdam is a pedestrian city. The Riksmuseum, Anne Frank, Van Gogh and Rembrant are the anchors, woven together with canal, cafe and restaurant.
What is it about the camera and travel? The camera was always an omnipotent presence about to be invisible and capture a specific moment of time and space. Now the tool becomes part of the set and the user is the actor. The game has shifted. The fourth wall has broken. Progress. Time moves on. The girl with the Pearl Earring is texting and The Woman by the Window with her pitcher is actually reaching for her cell.
The canal boat ferries two dozen people including one woman that points her arm in everyone’s face, unconscious of her action as she captures herself with anything and everything in the background. Her hand and camera are six inches from my nose as she whirls to show her hair from this light or that position. Would she be the subject of Vermeer? The girl with the mobile?
Maybe I’m just bitter or jealous of the enthusiasm of youth to capture itself…..If I take a selfie it looks like an AARP ad. Yet there is 81 year old Martha Stewart on the Swimsuit cover of Sports Illustrated.
I should allow the experience of visitors walking the steep stairs to Anne Frank’s house selfies in front of the revered diary. Who am I to be critical when I arrived here in a Mercedes Benz cab? Do we each have to find our own way through this world?
My partner chats about the biography of Gabriel Marquez she is reading. Travel, Camera, book. These were the staples. Now I realize she is quoting from an audio book she is listening to. Platforms change. The written word is sonorous, a constant comforting bedtime story through your ibuds. Certainly everything changes and with the abrupt Covid interruption it is like seeing a growing child after a growth spurt. They are somehow different and you are more aware not being present day to day. After 50 years revisiting Amsterdam makes me feel a bit like Rumplestiltskin.
Maybe it is time to believe in reincarnation….I have the same mind but in a different body than fifty years past. But Amsterdam seems the same, the start of so many journeys. Sometimes it is important to go back.
Maybe now the quote can change to “I photograph the world to make sure I am still a part of it.” Vermeer allegedly worked with a camera obscura, the photographic innovation of his time. Perhaps he would have been tempted to alter his point of view with the technology available now.
Now I am home, and will walk again in the morning at Shoreline Park. I promise I won’t photograph the sunrise and certainly not take a selfie grinning with the dawn. But perhaps this one day…..and only if I send it to my kids and grandkids. It is such a beautiful dawn. This just once. Maybe Winogrand was of his time and it’s OK to photograph to see how I look in the photograph.
If You Go
Grand Hotel Amrath is a five-star and a short walk from the train station. A cross between The Stanley Hotel made famous in The Shining and an Art Deco masterpiece. There is star-inflation here, due to its center proximity and its unique character. But a decent, convenient sanctuary nonetheless.
I join every other teen posting images of their meals. But smug, those pictures of my spouse eating celeriac with portobello mushrooms and grilled onions are somehow unique. Restaurant RED may be the most memorable food in a world of tastes that come from all over what was once the Dutch empire. The ceiling is a light box redhead blowing green bubblegum. Cozy, smart, hip and tasty.
An intersection of food and architecture is offered by the canal boats that populate the waterways like water bugs.. The sequence of waterborne boxcars each has a narrator and friendly staff that offer a selection of anecdotes, wines or uneventful cheeses. This is an easy way to sit down and see the city from a different, more historic vantage, welcomed at the end of a day pounding cobblestones. Remember this is a city that is difficult to navigate by car and canals are almost as prevalent as Venice. Speculate on what it would be to live on one of the 2,500 houseboats, ranging from delightful to decrepit. These were originally built to relieve a post World War II housing shortage. Maybe Santa Barbara can learn? The canal cruise is an enjoyable, easy two hours any time during the day,but it is not Paris. What the French city offers in grandeur and pomp, Amsterdam responds with charm and intimacy.
Anne Frank House
Not to be missed. I specifically did not record, but experienced. Inexplicably, no one else was taking pictures, shooting selfies. Every visitor was concentrating on their own thoughts. Sharing this space with this young girl and the horrors we are willing to bestow upon us again and again. Walking up the narrow steps, not turning to capture or celebrate an image, but experiencing a chilling necessary reminder. Maybe this is the one spot you don’t want to record an image of yourself, but think about those who are missing.
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