Composite with Portraits and Hair Dryer Display

Dutch photographer Gerard Petrus Fieret only came to photography after exhausting a host of other professions. Unceremoniously fired from apprenticeships with a pastry maker and an antiquarian, he began taking night classes at The Hague’s Royal Academy of Fine Art and did brief stints with a lampshade studio and a stained-glass artist before being displaced by World War II. Decades later, in 1965, he finally bought a Praktiflex camera from a baker and began taking pictures. This work is characteristic of his brief but intense engagement with the medium over following decade. As paranoid as he was prolific, Fieret believed other artists were copying his ideas and stealing his negatives. He was known to carry dozens of prints on his person, crammed into plastic bags for safeguarding. Creased, soiled, and torn, their surfaces also bear the mark of the stamps and signatures with which he branded his work—evidently an effort to remove their monetary value, as the word "PROOF" does on wedding portraits.


A haphazard archivist, Fieret was wary of relinquishing his photographs to other collections, and lamented the tendency of Dutch museums to mount and trim their acquisitions. He often made composite works from multiple images, and hoped to preserve the serial format of his work. Upon discovering that one such composite had been cut apart by a museum, he explained that it "was meant to be a special graphic piece exactly as it was and no other way…dreadful shame." This four-part assemblage is a rare surviving example. Riffing on the sequential images in the photograph at lower right—which show a model’s steps for styling her hair in a coiffeur’s display—Fieret arranges his own, more ambiguous series of pictures. One of these is an old family portrait, which appears in different iterations and croppings in several of his composites. It shows a young Fieret posing with his mother—a single parent whose chronic illness forced her to surrender her children to institutional care, where Fieret suffered greatly. Reunited here, among fashionable women and hair accoutrement, mother and son haunt their lighthearted young companions, standing as specters of a generation past.