In Conversation With: Koen Hauser: b. 1972, the Netherlands

GK: Nowadays, you’re obviously not someone who thinks in a very dogmatic way about photography – it’s something loose and malleable; you refer to ‘photographic works’ as opposed to photographs. This notion of fluidity extends across your use of different media, sometimes blended or mixed. Can you outline that? 

KH: In the beginning – about 25 years ago – I didn’t really have strong ideas about what photography was or could be, nor why I liked it so much. But in actually working with the medium it really crystallized that it is the representational character of photography that I like. The illusion of photography. I’m interested in that mental aspect of what is perception and what is reality, so in that sense I don’t think photography is the only medium I want to use to express what I think. I used to say that I started taking photographs because I couldn’t draw! 

In some of my projects, different media come together, but it’s also different dimensions in a certain way. Instead of talking about the strict historical division between certain media, I think about something that I want to express as data which can then unfold in two or three dimensions, or maybe more. Then it becomes a little more abstract! Photography is a way to make an imprint of reality using light, but a 3D scan that might form the basis of a cast for a sculpture is also an imprint of reality, comparable to the technique I used for the bronze sculpture Wij (2022) in Leiden. They’re quite similar. More and more, I think about photography as an imprint of reality, not as representing reality itself.

That being said, my projects aren’t strictly conceptual, even if they contain conceptual notions. As a kid, I used to make all kinds of weird-tasting potions and say it was magic, and my work now is similar: it’s something I cook up as a magician!

GK: Among your past projects, I wonder if there’s one that jumps out as really pivotal – where something really cemented in your practice?

KH: I think the first very important moment was when I was invited to work with the Spaarnestad photo archive back in 2008. That led to a project called De Luister van het Land, which also became a book, where I really discovered my fascination for historical photography: material that’s grounded in some kind of collective memory. I was given carte blanche to make new work, exploring an archive of over 10 million images and selecting quirky things that stood out to me. Already in the first weeks, the notion of the diorama – of rebuilding reality – surfaced in a very illustrative way. It became a kind of encyclopaedia of an imagined world, made up of a field of associations that you could make your own stories with. 

I was really able to time travel there and transcend my own personality; I ended up photoshopping myself into all these historic images, allowing me to be part of something that wasn’t in the here and now. I felt really deeply connected to it. I sometimes describe the project as a collection that features some kind of a Walt Disney figure in an imaginary world of his own design. I literally performed these characters, and every time you see me in a certain role, it’s about reality – about the difference between creator and creation.

Installation view of 'De Luister van het Land' at Galerie 37 Spaarnestad

GK: So there’s often this element of manipulation in your work, but it’s less pronounced in some of your other projects – Tableaux, for instance. I see you describe this project in quite ‘pure’ terms, though there’s still some manipulation going on in there?

KH: Tableaux came at a time when I was really done with everything around me, including the art world! I decided I simply wanted to make good photographs of stuff I like, and really just appreciate the physical appearance of these things, taken out of their original context. At that time, I had my studio in a building that also housed the depot of Rijksmuseum Boerhaave which is our national museum of science and medicine history, so that was really nice!

GK: A funny coincidence!

KH: Yes! And of course I loved that building. So that was how Tableaux came to life. I used the digital technique of photo stacking, which means the images are extremely large and hyperreal in quality, so you can really drown in them when you’re in front of them: you can even see the dust on the objects in the compositions. Seeing them on a computer screen doesn’t do them justice! In a sense, that project is also about reality and how far we can go into it, but on a more basic level.

GK: And what was it like to work with digital image manipulation in the pre-AI days: what were the tools in your toolbox?

KH: Well I was always interested in different techniques because there’s always something at play which creates that magic of reality – a medium in between! I’ve done large format analogue photography, digital photography, photoshopping, I’ve made a stereo photography installation, a 3D movie. With my Skulptura series, I also started exploring 3D photogrammetry, modelling and rendering. AI is just the next chapter in following up these other techniques.

GK: But is AI making some of those earlier techniques redundant in the context of your practice? 

KH: No, I don’t think AI makes other tools obsolete. What I like about AI is that I can easily make images that used to cost so much money, time and effort to create. At the same time, the process of making sometimes informs you on the work itself; doing stuff with AI can feel very empty because you put in a few prompts and you’re given thousands of options. Back in 2001, I made a little booklet about my sister who passed away, trying to picture what she would have looked like at 24. It took me about six weeks to create anything close to a portrait – but nowadays we’d just input an image of her mother, her father, her siblings, and there would be countless options! But of course, it wouldn’t have provided me with much meaning. In that sense, I think it’s nice to use these tools and techniques alongside one another. AI also tends to render towards the most common or conventional way of representing something, so the creativity lies in how you use it.

GK: Your Skulptura project is probably the work I know best: could you describe that for us?

KH: Skulptura is a kind of reflection on my different ways of trying to grasp the nature of sculpture – a medium of time and space – juxtaposed to photography. On the one hand, it’s about photography as this representational medium that gives you an illusion of something you can’t really touch, so there’s this disconnect between the image and reality. The collection of images that make up Skulptura, as well as my source material – which I always think is important to showcase alongside it – is the result of all kinds of techniques, of building and merging. In the end you can read it as something very fluid: there’s no clear distinction between two dimensions and three dimensions in what you see. When people look at the work, they tend to wonder how it came to life, and I think that’s important. If I were only to explain my technique, what I was doing, that sense of mystery and magic is gone. That’s maybe the essence of what I want to convey, hiding the structure and showing only the output. That’s maybe an analogy with alchemy, where you present an enigma to be approached in a more abstract way. 

GK: And the source images you’re reworking are primarily archival images?

KH: Yeah, mainly printed images from old books. That’s an important aspect, because it makes my works a kind of distorted reproduction of a reproduction. I also used archival images from the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum: that’s those two big large of a space with sculptures installed there. Although it’s definitely a kind of meta loop – the idea of a representation of a representation of a representation – it’s not that I want people to talk about that aspect in a really cognitive way. It’s more interesting that you feel that in your body or try to grasp at it visually!

GK: When I look at the distorted sculptures in your images, I find them quite aesthetically appealing, but I’ve seen you call them unsettling in the past. Why do you think that is?

KH: Well, the unsettling part is your awareness that it’s a representation: you know that you can’t actually touch it, it’s locked somehow in two dimensions. It’s about not being able to fully reach them: we might long for something that’s transcendent but all we have in the end is this interface through which to interpret the world around us. But it’s not only a limiting factor – it’s also about celebrating our sensory engagement with the world, because it’s the only way we can know it!