Juul Hondius

From Research into News Images to Staged Photography

Hondius’s turn toward migration and citizenship can be traced to a period of study at FAMU in Prague in 1997. He visited Roma families who had been denied Czech citizenship and recognized how existing reporting confined Roma people to types associated with wandering, poverty, and crime. For The Tolerance Campaign, he reduced the explanatory background of the domestic environment and displayed the faces and postures of his subjects as posters in public space.^*1 He later researched images of the Kosovo conflict, Palestine, Afghanistan, and European migration policy, constructing scenes from interviews that resembled news photographs without serving as evidence of a particular event.

Building “Possible Scenes” from Testimony and Field Research

Production begins with research into migration policy, ethnic conflict, border control, and military institutions. Hondius gathers personal testimony alongside press photographs and constructs a “reality that could have happened” with actors and collaborators from several experiences. His official description of Photographic Works calls the combination of media imagery and personal testimony “fiction based on fact.”^*2 Around 2010, he conducted many interviews with young Afghan migrants in Paris and Calais. He later wrote that an encounter at sea in 2025 with people traveling toward the United Kingdom made their vulnerability register as a reality different from familiar news images.^*3 Staging measures the difference between visual types and face-to-face experience; it does not simply substitute imagination for a distant event.

News photographs are commonly read as evidence of situations witnessed on location. Hondius makes the constructed nature of his scenes clear through the exhibition setting and assigns the works a task separate from verifying facts. Even without a place name or event caption, viewers rapidly supply narratives such as “refugees,” “conflict,” and “forced migration.” That response makes it possible to examine the roles of repeated press imagery, advertising polish, and captions in the public understanding of political events. ^*2

Experiences gathered through several interviews are not consolidated into a script that reenacts one person’s testimony. They are divided into luggage, posture, distance inside a vehicle, and buildings in the background. The absence of a direct correspondence between a finished photograph and one witness can protect personal information, while also weakening the specificity of experience. The ethical question of staging lies less in a binary between fact and fiction than in the point at which testimony becomes an anonymous visual sign.

Leaving Unexplained Details within the Finish of News Photography

Hondius’s large color photographs render clothing, luggage, and vehicle color with controlled clarity. Their finish, close to advertising photography, attracts the eye first. Continued looking reveals that a cart is unnaturally clean, that several gazes align too perfectly, or that it is difficult to decide who is guarding whom. The beauty of the frame can make political suffering easy to consume, while these discrepancies interrupt the first interpretation and send the viewer back into the image. ^*2

The Visual Types Used to Explain Migration and Conflict

In The Tolerance Project, Hondius photographed Roma people in the Czech Republic and avoided using their living environment as an explanatory background, seeking to weaken the established stereotype of a wandering group.^*1 Reducing the background can obscure social conditions, yet it also creates distance from a journalistic convention in which poverty or itinerant life stands in for the whole person. What the frame excludes, and how much the title explains, shapes whether a subject is seen as an individual or as the sign of a social problem.

Bus windows, stacked luggage, waiting crowds, and border fences have become rapid signs for “migration,” “flight,” and “deportation” in news imagery. Hondius designs scenes from field research and testimony, repeating the same signs in arrangements that are slightly too emphatic. His official account of Photographic Works places the tension between the seduction of commercial photography and sociopolitical content at the center of the method.^*2 As more figures appear with similar postures and belongings, individual histories recede and the image approaches a generalized picture of “the migrant.”

The Bus Photographs: How the Vehicle Turns Individuals into a Group

In the best-known bus images, window frames separate faces one by one, while the direction of the seats and the structure of the vehicle submit everyone to the same movement. The bus crosses borders, but it also regulates boarding, waiting, and surveillance, presenting different people as a “group in transit.” Collection records at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen include Bus and UN Defender, situating them within a continuing body of work on mobility and institutions.^*4

Titles suppress place names and event names, making it difficult to determine country, ethnicity, or reason for movement from the image alone. The same window, luggage, and exhausted posture can be assigned different histories and agents of responsibility when labeled “evacuation,” “deportation,” or “migrant labor.” The Stedelijk Museum’s paradocs program presented the works as deliberate disturbances of the boundary between reality and staging.^*5 The viewer’s change of story before and after reading a title or exhibition text becomes part of the work.

To Unveil a Star: The Time through Which an Institution Stages Itself

The 2021 film To Unveil a Star follows, in a partly fictionalized form, the artist’s long relationship with a star-shaped sculpture symbolizing NATO. The official project page describes it as an essay film about his relation to a work of art that gives form to a global political ideal.^*6 Moved when NATO facilities relocated, the sculpture changes site, unveiling ceremony, and publicity footage while continuing to provide the abstract idea of alliance unity with a material appearance. Labyrint Film likewise presents the film as an intersection of political symbolism and the artist’s personal fixation.^*7

The still photographs make it difficult to decide within one frame whether a scene is found or staged. In the film, the sculpture’s transport, negotiations, archival footage, and narration unfold in sequence, revealing the process by which an institution prepares its visible form. Stroom Den Haag’s Alliance and Allegiance presented the work through a discussion of NATO’s visual politics and geopolitical imagery.^*8 Hondius’s subject expands from a single event to the long duration through which sculpture, architecture, ceremony, and publicity repeat a political idea.

The Risk That Staging Dilutes Real Suffering

Reenacting refugees or ethnic conflict with actors and collaborators risks converting lived experience into polished fiction and obscuring specific agents of responsibility. Suppressing the place and event can expose a viewer’s assumptions, but it can also erase differences among political situations. In light of the official description of the relation among press images, testimony, and constructed photography, evaluation must consider which sources were used, who participated, and at what stage testimony became an anonymous visual sign, beyond the disclosure that a scene was staged. ^*2

Controlled color and composition can make images of refugees and conflict comfortable to consume in a museum. Hondius does not use rough image quality as a guarantee of truth. He attracts the viewer through the finish of art photography, then delays interpretation through objects that are too clean, gazes that align too precisely, and ambiguous titles. At times this pause resists immediate consumption; at others the beauty of the image can remain dominant. The conditions of production and the exhibition text therefore matter to the assessment of each work. ^*2

Separating Political Photography as Evidence from Political Photography as a Model of Understanding

Hondius’s photographs do not aim to replace the evidentiary function of press images. Field research and testimony support their production, while the finished frame exposes which composition, background, gesture, and remembered news image the viewer used to understand the situation. Criticism on the official site identifies the tension between commercial photographic aesthetics and sociopolitical information as the work’s method.^*2 Where reporting seeks to verify what happened, his constructed photographs return the question of what kind of human figure the viewer believed they were seeing.

The star-shaped sculpture followed in To Unveil a Star was made to visualize unity among NATO members and moved when the institution relocated. Stroom Den Haag’s Alliance and Allegiance presented the film as a project about sculpture, NATO publicity, and political allegiance after the Cold War.^*8 An abstract ideal reaches bodies and memory through a sculpture outside a building, an unveiling ceremony, archival footage, and the time the artist spends following it, as well as through conference documents. The problem of political imagery expands from photographs of events to the performances through which institutions maintain their own appearance.

Taken together, materials from the artist’s official site, CNAP, and AKINCI describe a sustained “almost documentary” approach combining press imagery, advertising lighting, testimony, and reenactment, beyond a single project on refugees.^{*9*10*15*18*19} Archives at the Van Abbemuseum and de Appel, together with exhibition records at Photography Now, document the sustained reception of his constructed photographs within Dutch photography and contemporary art, particularly in debates over the truth claims of news imagery.^*12*14*17

Production materials and interviews for To Unveil a Star present the pursuit of NATO’s star-shaped sculpture as a long-term relation that includes the artist’s own fixation and participation, not simply an external critique of an institutional symbol.^*13*20 More recent projects with climate activists and exhibitions centered on local faces extend the question developed through migration and military institutions—who is represented in public space—into climate politics and regional portraiture.^*16*11