WHY NOT

The city is where the photographer Otto Snoek works, and people, and how they relate to their urban environment, are his subject. In Rotterdam, the city where he was born, he gravitates to the places where crowds tend to form, whether for a particular reason or not, like public events, transportation interchanges, shopping streets or squares. With the metropolitan decor as its backdrop, his work can be placed in the photographic tradition of street photography to which Ed van der Elsken, Joel Meyerowitz and Martin Parr, among others, also belong.

Snoek works from an genuine amazement with what he encounters, and follows mass culture and the consumerism connected with it with a critical eye. Thus, often without his subjects realising it, he is able to capture moments that in their immediacy scrupulously visualise his take on our society. Although they confront us with raw reality, the images are not cynical, nor are they provocative. Quite on the contrary, they are often nuanced by a layer of humour that is typical of his work. In all this, he employs a highly individual photographic style, characterised by its speed and intuition. The images are colourful and filled to the brim with detail. They are visual spectacles that sometimes remind one more of a theatre performance than of an actual, everyday situation.

For Snoek Rotterdam is the model for a broader, international development that is manifesting itself particularly in the big cities, in which, in addition to commerce, rising nationalism and political populism also play a great role. In this connection, as well as working in Rotterdam he also works in other cities as part of a larger European project. Snoek addresses the viewer with the title of the exhibition just as directly as he photographs his subjects. The question of how one is to judge what his photos show us must ultimately be answered by the viewers themselves.