Ariadne van de Ven obituary | Books
This content was originally published by Ann Sohn-Rethel on 23 April 2017 | 4:58 pm.
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Our friend Ariadne van de Ven, who has died aged 56 of cancer, was a book publicist and photographer of street life in Kolkata, which she wrote about in original ways.
Ariadne was born in Heerlen, in the Netherlands, the daughter of Jep, a solicitor, and Rose Marie (nee Van Grunsven). At the University of Utrecht, she was a brilliant student and gained a master’s in English language and literature. She moved to London in 1987 having met her future partner and eventual husband, the bookseller John Prescott.
Soon she was working for Yale University Press, then as WW Norton’s European publicity manager for six years, before turning freelance in 2000. A colleague who became a friend recalls her “combining insight, tact, sympathy and realism with a light touch”. After a lecture tour, the poet Adrienne Rich said that with Ariadne she knew at once she was in the best of hands.
In 1988 Ariadne had co-founded with Clare Baker the Women in Publishing International Committee, meetings of which are remembered for their wine and laughter as well as ardent feminism.
But that was work. “The hobby that became a project,” was how Ariadne characterised her trips to Kolkata, an annual fixture from 2002. Her friend, Krishna Dutta, described her “walking for miles along the crowded dusty streets … cutting a striking figure as a tall western woman draped in shalwar kamiz, with a camera dangling from her neck, a smiling face and welcoming eyes”. By 2008 she had used 167 rolls of film.
Ariadne mentions this fact in the first of two MA theses (Goldsmiths, 2008, and Royal Holloway, 2015). The course was Photography and Urban Cultures, and her title, The Eyes of the Street Look Back. Their looking back was the point: interact with your subjects, do not photograph them unawares. Nevertheless, Photographing People Is Wrong was a piece she wrote for the journal City, also in 2008. The title was an ironical dig at Susan Sontag’s ambivalent views on the value of photography, but Ariadne’s quarrel was with ignorant western stereotypes, cliched images of passive poverty. “I am not a camera and nor is my camera,” she wrote. There was nothing objective about a photographer’s choices.
Ariadne processed films in her darkroom, always black-and-white, and gave prints of her quirky, nuanced portraits to participants (if she could find them) on her next visit to Kolkata. She involved herself with London Independent Photography and Drik, the activist photo agency in Kolkata. A permanent home for her archive is being sought.
By British standards Ariadne could seem almost seriously intellectual. At variance with one of her tutors, she would email a draft of her counterblast: 13 pages of cultural anthropology, with references. But she would not mind if you found it heavy going. As a friend, she was as much a listener as a talker. She had recently volunteered with Women for Refugee Women.
She and John married in 2000; he died in 2014. She is survived by Rose Marie, and her sister, Esther.
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