[Portrait of a Woman (Marianne) with Hand at Side of Face]

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 if making up for lost time, he photographed obsessively, favoring female subjects for intimate studio sessions like this one, with frequent model Marianne.

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. Here emblazoned across Marianne’s body, such imprints reflect Fieret’s art school training in illustration and graphic design. Uneasy with the designation of photographer, he preferred to identify as a fotograficus, or "photo-graphic" artist.