Photography Exhibition by Roeland Verhallen

Come to the opening reception of Roeland Verhallen’s exhibition, which includes a short talk about his work.

Roeland Verhallen (born Ravenstein, NL, 1989) recently finished his doctoral thesis on the topic of visual perception, at the University of Cambridge. He is presenting two series of photographs at the Dutch Centre: “il faut que je sois” and “I, the Photograph.”

What connections across time are made possible by objects, by places, by ancestry? Verhallen and his great-grandfather are separated by a century, and indeed their lives have never overlapped, but what survives is a bowler hat and a pocket watch. Yet, to what extent are their lives similar, to what extent are they connected? Is a semi-shared genetic profile and two objects enough to establish a link? Exploring themes of transience and of enactment, the series “il faut que je sois” follows the protagonist as he struggles with the passage of time, captured on medium format film in the various quarters of Paris.

In the series “I, the Photograph,” Verhallen explores what the face can show, or hide, about a person’s self. Because methods of conventional portraiture felt too constraining, the result too forced, this series employs an altogether different setup: in an attempt to gain access to a person’s unguarded emotions, the photographer and the camera were hidden and subjects were asked to bring along five pieces of music. Clearing the usual impediments – the presence of the photographer, the focus on taking the shot – sought to come closer to capturing the subject’s essence. The resulting portraits are bright and unforgiving.