The Hague Museum of Photography Stadhouderslaan 43 2501 Den Haag Norvège
Both Paolo Ventura and Jasper de Beijer play with reality in their photographs. After all, a photograph shows what is seen through the lens. However, what if that is not actually reality, but a specially constructed version of reality? In his series War Souvenir and Winter Stories Ventura photographed events that he himself had never witnessed, bringing them to life with miniatures, scale models and dioramas. Jasper de Beijer goes even further: he makes life-size, three-dimensional models - often of paper - which he then photographs, producing images reminiscent of Victorian prints. Fabulous Fictions shows us that, in their work, nothing is what it seems.
Paolo Ventura and Jasper de Beijer, masters of narrative staged photography, do not use their camera in the traditional way, recording the world around them. They use it to tell their own stories. Drawing inspiration from the past, both these artists create their own universe, with great attention to detail and using enormous skill to produce sets and props that are almost artworks in themselves. By photographing these imagined worlds from the right angle, Ventura manages to convince us that we are part of the scene, while in De Beijer's images we are not sure what we are really looking at: a print, an installation, another world?