“Hans Eijkelboom, born in 1949 in Arnhem, Netherlands – has paced streets from New York to Shanghai with his camera, to capture little points of commonality in the way each city’s inhabitants behave and dress. The resulting project — People of the Twenty-First Century — offers a fascinatingly simple sociological study into individuality in relation to collective behaviour. “
(White)
In the interview for this article, Eijkelboom, doesn’t see himself as a street photographer, more a social documentary photographer. He has been travelling to different cities around he world for over 20 years. Where he has systematically recorded the people using the city.
He spends time noticing trends and then sets himself a couple of hours to capture as many people replicating that theme as he can. He has built up body of work that was published in various books. He thinks its more important to the continuous stream of repeating themes than singular incidents. I think he is commenting humans being groups, who fit in society by copying each other. Even some people in the images who you might think are dressed in an unconventional way are not unique when shown as part of a group of images of people wearing similar dress!
I actually found this quite engaging and wonder if I walked to promenade of my sleepy south coast seaside town, what themes I would find?
In the video below, Eijkelboom explains how he takes the images covertly (see exercise 2.2), but says that people are becoming more aware, so after a few years he may need to change his methods.
References:
White, Ryan. “The Photographer Proving We’re Not so Different after All.” I-D, 10 Jan. 2020, i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/k7e83e/hans-eijkelboom-photographer-street-fusion-bristol-in-2019.
