The bar is set always higher by Roy Kahmann: It is with renewed pleasure that I visit the Haute Photographie events in Rotterdam or in Amsterdam. High quality display and presentation, top notch photographers, beautiful setup. I don’t pretend to like everything but recognize that Roy Kahmann is doing a fantastic job promoting carefully selected emerging as well as confirmed artists, more than fifty in total. This time around, the event was in a new home, Studio3000, located in Amsterdam-Noord: a large space, all in white, walls and ceiling, with several artists on display present at the event. On top of that, I was in very pleasant and unexpected company from France, right after work. What else to ask for? The work of David Ballam showing Africa as we don’t know it: a bit of Sebastiao Salgado and Jimmy Nelson with a notch extra: according to Roy, David is the only photographer, with Salgado, daring to show blurred backgrounds: these are just perfect, with focus on the massive horns of these domestic animals. Going further, I admired the delicate photographs of Anna Riabova, inspired by Dutch masters, “Escape” by Olga Karlovac or Joep Hijwegen’s colorful “Blur”. I particularly enjoyed the work by two artists “dialoguing” with AI. Hassan Ragab presents a world that could be, overtaken by over-population, with improbable assemblies of buildings and busses, all crowded: a mixture of reality with impossible architecture, the Egypt of tomorrow? Funny and Frightening. Fully enjoyable. The other artist is Nancy Poeran. From a picture, Nancy dialogues with an AI to arrive at the essence of things. Over and over, she manipulates the output generated by the AI, add sketches and feeds it back to the machine until she reaches her goal. The result is stunning, and all is said in the title of the work ” We are all made of light and shadow”. Enlightening shapes of light and shadows. A masterpiece.
