Photographers Anoek Steketee

The Dutch Anoek Steketee, born in 1974, had already started working for the theater during her photography studies at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. The dramaturgy in the theaters normally expected flawless snapshots, which would as effectively as possible grasp the progress of the production’s plot. It is rare and, for stage producers, often undesirable to find theater photography that goes beyond the attentive documentary, leaving it behind for an asserted autonomy in which an entire evening of theater is compacted into an effective and subjectively opinionated image. This is why it’s not hard to believe that an ambitious photographer would leave the theater to explore the borders between art and life. What better place for such a task than the capital of Cuba, its irrevocably fleeting eras and theatrical melancholy, lending it an inescapable flair. In Havana, Anoek Steketee approached her protagonists asking if they were prepared to pose as models for a still portrait from the films of their lives or fantasies.The resulting photographs very visibly went beyond the genre, addressing the fluctuating boundaries between reality and fiction. Even though her photographs are reminiscent of the subtle metropolitan stagings of Philip-Lorca dir Corcia, Anoek Steketee developed a theatrically trained, poetic perspective, enabling her to asset the oneness of places, times and activities and display an individualistic quality. The result of forcing fiction and reality together, and leaving the poetic and the documentary to struggle with each other, is the development of a photograph with an extraordinarily explosive force. The fissure doesn’t only go through the layers of the image, but also conveys itself directly towards the viewer asking, with absolute urgency, questions about the staging of his own existence.
Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch

                                        >>>Anoek Steketee