Arno Nollen

The Netherlands in the 1990s: From the Single Portrait to Seeing in Sequence

From the 1990s onward, Arno Nollen repeatedly returned to the human figure across photography, film, photobooks, and installation. Fotomuseum Den Haag identifies the “photo series” as the central unit of his work and describes the slight differences between repeated images as operating in a territory between film and photography, rather than treating each photograph as self-contained^*1.

In a retrospective of Frans Zwartjes, whose experimental films and photographs addressed the body, desire, and psychological tension, Fotomuseum Den Haag named Arno Nollen, Hester Scheurwater, and Paul Kooiker among later artists who similarly entered psychological territory through images of women’s bodies^*23 Nollen’s portrait sequences can therefore be understood not only within still photography, but also within a Dutch visual culture in which photography and film intersected.

Netherlands Now; l’école du nord, published by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in 2006, included Nollen among twenty-six artists surveying Dutch photography from 2000 to 2005 and placed him within the same photographic culture as Rineke Dijkstra, Paul Kooiker, Koos Breukel, and others^*5.

Photography Now records solo exhibitions from the 2000s onward, including Just, showing that his work was consistently presented as series in exhibitions as well as in photobooks^*8 Within this environment, Nollen chose to leave time and judgment unsettled by placing similar images beside one another instead of defining a sitter through a single decisive expression.

Rineke Dijkstra, working at the same time, photographed young people on beaches between 1992 and 1996 as individual portraits that preserve the ambiguity of adolescence^*24 Nollen differs in his repetition of closely related images, which extends the duration of looking itself. In 2002, Dijkstra proposed a three-person exhibition at Jan Mot featuring Hans Aarsman, Nollen, and Johannes Schwartz, confirming that the two artists were in contact within the same photographic network^*25.

Lighting, Posing, and Negotiation with the Model: Avoiding a Single Ideal Image

Kunstmuseum Den Haag compares Gerard Fieret, Paul Kooiker, and Arno Nollen and describes Nollen as highly attentive to lighting, pose, cropping, and compositional detail, deliberately directing the viewer’s gaze^*3.

At the same time, Annet Gelink Gallery’s material on Still Life records that the photographs and films made at Hotel Costes between 2009 and 2012 avoided large-scale studio lighting, makeup, and styling^*4.

Even without elaborate lighting or styling, a portrait is edited through where the sitter stands, the moment the shutter is released, and the selection and sequencing of photographs. Nollen’s staging lies less in elaborate sets than in the small decisions through which shooting and editing construct a way of looking.

Nollen exercised strong control over lighting, pose, and framing even when an image appeared to be a casual snapshot. This was explicitly noted in a 2001 Kunstmuseum Den Haag exhibition comparing his work with that of Gerard Fieret and Paul Kooiker^*3 The question is whether photographic control can simply be equated with control over the model.

Educational materials from Frac Grand Large position Nollen’s figures against the idealized beauty of fashion magazines. They describe the photographer as seeking intimacy with his models while the subjects resist being reduced to a simplified single image^*26 The many slight variations in expression and posture that remain from long shooting sessions can therefore be understood as preserving an unresolved relationship between the photographer’s direction and the model’s resistance or self-presentation, rather than selecting one “finished” image of a woman.

Nollen himself strongly objected to male viewers or gallerists reducing the work to the pleasure of looking at nudity, and said that he wanted the photographs to open dialogue and discussion^*18 Repetition of young women therefore cannot be romanticized simply as intimacy. The work uses desire while returning to viewers the question of which images that desire selects and how it gives them meaning.

Repeated Portraits: How Minimal Differences Produce Time

In its text on Just, Fotomuseum Den Haag notes that repeated photographs prompt unconscious comparison, recollection, and association, producing responses that range from fascination and excitement to rejection and discomfort^*1.

Fries Museum likewise presents Nollen’s work in series and explains that his repeated pursuit of the same subject can result in groups of photographs separated by only minimal differences^*14.

Repetition prevents a person’s “true face” from being sealed into a single frame. Small changes in gaze, the angle of a shoulder, clothing, distance, or light alter the impression of the same person. When several still images are seen in succession, each new image is read through memory of the previous one. The photographs remain still, but time emerges between them.

Landscape Stories’ She, passed by, …again presents portraits made in 1997 and 2013 in sequence, turning the act of “seeing again” named in the title into the structure of the series^*12.

Pleasure and Unease in Looking: Keeping the Ethics of Portraiture inside the Work

The Tichy Ocean Foundation collection text states that Nollen photographed young women he encountered in public in more enclosed settings. Although the sitters consented, the work retains tension between trust and distrust, documentation and sexualized looking^*2.

PlacArt Photo’s presentation of the photobook REGARDE includes a 1999 Noorderlicht text that identifies the transgressive quality of repeatedly looking at young women^*17.

Consent alone does not resolve the ethical questions. An asymmetry remains around who holds the camera, whose body is repeatedly looked at, and which images are retained through editing. Nollen’s work is best read as making that unease part of the viewing situation, asking how long the viewer chooses to continue looking instead of treating the discomfort as external to the work.

In A Girl’s Pornography at Kunsthal Rotterdam in 1999, one enlarged snapshot was presented with six videos. Viewers “zapped” among the moving images as though changing television channels, constructing their own relationships between fear, exhibitionism, and curiosity^*16 The photographer no longer controls the gaze alone; the viewer’s choices create the sequence of the work. Repetition and moving image bring the power relation of who looks at whom from the shooting situation into the exhibition space itself.

Just: Reediting the Archive into Eight Sequences

For Just in 2016, Nollen reselected hundreds of photographs from his 1997–2016 archive and organized them into eight new series within an installation. Fotomuseum Den Haag presented the entire exhibition—including photographs, video, archival material, and lighting—as a single work^*1.

Book information preserved on Nollen’s official site shows that a “storyline” from Just was also produced as a forty-eight-page publication, moving between exhibition space and printed form^*11.

This reediting shows that the moment of exposure did not determine the work’s final form. Reordering older images changes how relationships between figures and time are read. For Nollen, the photobook and the exhibition are media for designing the pace and order of repetition, not simply containers for finished photographs.

Still Life, REGARDE, and the Photobook: Designing the Pace of Looking

Still Life places photographs and film in the same exhibition, juxtaposing the instant of a figure with extended duration. Annet Gelink Gallery describes the semi-private space of a hotel as a setting in which tension arises from how much of themselves the subjects choose to offer to the camera^*4.

The Rijksmuseum Research Library catalogs the 2015 publication Photography Arno Nollen under photography, photobooks, and portrait photography^*21.

The library also holds the catalog Arno Nollen, published in connection with his 2004–05 exhibition at De Hallen Haarlem, documenting how his sequences were organized through publication as well as exhibition space^*22.

FAULT Magazine presents Hooked, made with Paul Kooiker and Maria Heiden, as a photobook and collaborative project, indicating that Nollen’s work circulated through publishing networks as well as solo exhibitions^*7.

Noorderlicht records Nollen as a Dutch photographer who lived from 1964 to 2022 and publishes the Wonderland series online^*9 The coexistence of access to individual works and to complete sequences also helps explain why Nollen is difficult to summarize through a single representative photograph.

The Frac Grand Large collection database makes individual photographs by Nollen available as collection objects, including black-and-white works from 2008^*13 Individual photographs enter collections, but Nollen’s own method gives greater weight to comparisons between several images than to the symbolic elevation of one frame.

Within Dutch Portrait Photography: Differences from Dijkstra and Kooiker

PhotoQ placed Nollen within a discussion at Foam in Amsterdam on the desire to look, connecting his work to fashion photography and the gaze of desire^*6.

Leiden University’s photography research site discusses Paul Kooiker as an artist who uses photography’s technical limitations while also drawing on film and painting. This provides a broader background for experiments in contemporary Dutch photography that did not limit portraiture to the recording of identity^*20.

A 2001 exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag directly compared images of women by Fieret, Kooiker, and Nollen^*19 Nollen belongs neither to typology, which aligns subjects as specimens under fixed rules, nor to an entirely spontaneous snapshot aesthetic. His closely related consecutive images activate memory and desire through their differences.

Why “Intimate Portraiture” Is Not Enough

Nollen’s page in the Mediamatic archive gathers past work and interests in film, rhythm, fashion, and other fields alongside photography, showing a practice that cannot easily be confined to still images^*15.

The photography and culture magazine FLATT likewise describes Nollen as photographing people beyond professional models and notes the restrained styling of his images^*18.

Foam’s page on Koos Breukel includes a 2005 portrait of Arno Nollen and Natacha Juliac, showing Nollen himself as a sitter within the interpersonal network of contemporary Dutch portrait photography^*10.

Nollen’s sequences repeat the same person with slight variations and give those images an order through books, moving image, and exhibition. Comparison and hesitation arise in the viewing process. The portrait no longer guarantees identity in a single frame; it becomes a continuum in which the model’s behavior, the photographer’s direction, and the viewer’s judgment shift over time.