Eggs and Rarities

by Paul Kooiker (Photographer)

Paul Kooiker’s “encyclopaedia of life” in 164 images. This ambitious but utopian project reads like a sampler of photographic genres: landscape, nude, still life, etc. To achieve this, Kooiker often uses clichés more reminiscent of the propaganda of tourist brochures or of religious and political rhetoric in the media.

Kooiker increasingly allows the personal to creep into the work. Intimate private photographs break through the seemingly objective approach so that public and private space spill over into each other. The result is one large work in which the complexity of things converge: the artist himself, the medium of photography, life and death.

171 pages, Hardcover

First published September 19, 2018

About the author

Paul Kooiker was born in 1964 in Rotterdam. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 1996, he received the Prix-de-Rome Photography, and in 2009, the A. Roland Holst Award for his oeuvre. Kooiker’s work is part of (inter)national public and private collections, and he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions both in the Netherlands and abroad. In addition to his autonomous work, he also photographs for leading fashion magazines such as AnOther, Purple, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine, and for well-known brands like Acne Studios, Diesel, Hermés, and Louis Vuitton. Kooiker lives and works in Amsterdam.