Disneyfication is dedicated to my late wife Leny Derksen Vaessen
‘Disneyfication’ is a visual photographic investigation into how ‘ordinary’ reality is disguised and hidden as our public spaces are changed through the intervention and use of imagery.
Theo Derksen explores the process through which our public spaces have become increasingly globalized and homogenous, not just in their structures but also in their use of imagery. More and more, the spaces have acquired the characteristics of an amusement park. New places are created to enable people to experience a more perfect version of reality – places which are easy to understand and appear safe for everyone. As far as is possible, problems such as decline, poverty and traffic congestion are eliminated and the environment is arranged in a way that stimulates people’s behaviour in their drive to consume.
Theo Derksen is a Dutch photographer who has received several awards including the Kodak Award, a Polaroid sponsorship, The Amsterdam Art Foundation Grant and the Limburg Art Grant. After studying Photography and Audio Visual Design he worked as a trainee with Magnum photographer Ernst Haas before becoming a photojournalist for several Dutch newspapers and magazines. In 1990 he became an associate professor in photography and research at University Zuyd Art Department and later Head of Visual Communications. He has also been a visiting professor at many major educational establishments.
The book includes an interview with Francine Houben, creative director and founding partner of Netherlands-based Mecanoo Architects. Perhaps best known in the UK as the architect of Birmingham Library, she is currently involved in the refurbishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. and the New York Public Library.
Dewi Lewis 2019.
DISNEYFICATION
edited and designed by Teun van der Heijden.
Interviews
Francine Houben
by Jan Bierhoff and Theo Derksen
Theo Derksen
by Jan Bierhoff
Text
Jan Bierhoff
Lithography
Sebastiaan Hanekroot
Colours and Books
DISNEYFICATION
The book and photographs are presented and for sale at Pennings Foundation Eindhoven
Soft back with dust jacket.
£35.00 UK / $50.00 USA / € 39,00
160 pages, 69 colour plates, 287mm x 205mm
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Dewi Lewis Publishing is a partnership owned and run by Caroline Warhurst and Dewi Lewis.
Founded in 1994, its photography list has an international reputation and has included books by leading British and international photographers such as Laia Abril, William Klein, Martin Parr, Simon Norfolk, Fay Godwin, Tom Wood, Sergio Larrain, Frank Horvat, John Blakemore, Paolo Pelegrin, Simon Roberts and Bruce Gilden. The aim of the company is to bring to the attention of a wider public, accessible but challenging contemporary photography by both established and lesser known practitioners. The company has a worldwide distribution network and is recognized as one of the leading photographic publishers in the world. It publishes around 20 new titles each year.
Dewi Lewis Publishing also works in close collaboration with a number of European publishers and was a founding member of The European Publishers Award for Photography, which ran from 1994 to 2016. In 2014 Dewi Lewis Publishing received the PHoto Espana’s prize for Outstanding Publishing House of the Year.
Caroline Warhurst has been involved in the company for most of its 25 year history. Her father and grandfather, both known as Bill Warhurst, were, for many decades, press photographers with The Times, London. Caroline began working in photography at Manchester Studies Photography Archive, where in addition to her role as a researcher she also programmed a photographic gallery at Manchester Polytechnic. As a key member of The Documentary Photography Archive she was involved in the commissioning of several contemporary photographers including Martin Parr, Clement Cooper and John Darwell. In the early 1990s she set up Photo file, a company publishing photographic postcards and greetings cards.
Before establishing the imprint, Dewi Lewis was the founding Director of Cornerhouse, one of the major UK Centres for Contemporary Visual Arts and Film, based in Manchester. In 1987 he established Cornerhouse Publications which achieved recognition internationally for its ambitious and imaginative publishing programm and was a winner of the Sunday Times Award for Small Publisher of the Year.
Many of the titles published by the company have been shortlisted for a range of international prizes and several have won awards. Dewi’s own book entitled Publishing Photography was selected by Photo-eye (USA) as the Best Photography Resource Book of the Year.
Dewi Lewis was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2004 and in November 2009 he was awarded the inaugural Royal Photographic Society Award for Outstanding Services to Photography. He was awarded the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing at the World Photography Awards in April 2012.
In 2018 the company won both the Paris Photo / Aperture Foundation Photobook of The Year Award and the Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Prize.
FOTODOK BOOK CLUB 3 oktober2019.
Gasten zijn: Samuel Fosso, Ilvy Njioiktjien, Csilla Klenyanszki en Theo Derksen.
De FOTODOK Book Club is een live talkshow waarin fotograaf en fotoboekenliefhebber ROB HORNSTRA op het podium in gesprek gaat met makers van fotoboeken: fotografen, ontwerpers en uitgevers worden aan de tand gevoeld over hun laatste project. Internationale gasten van allure vertellen over het verhaal achter hun laatste project en over de keuzes die ze gemaakt hebben bij het tot stand komen van hun publicatie. Levendige gesprekken met af en toe een kritische noot gegarandeerd.
Theo Derksen’s Disneyfication, over twenty years in the making, a book of vivid color double-page spreads, offers a global vision of metropolises, including Bucharest, Berlin, Egypt, Tokyo, Dubai, Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore and Las Vegas. It is by no means total or all-encompassing. There has been a deliberate choice to not take pictures of the big capitalist centres, London and New York. Proportionately most photographs are taken in cities in China.
A meeting with Jean Baudrillard in 1995 got Derksen started on the project and the book opens with a quote from the philosopher: “It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate that there is nothing behind them.” We are then, I presume, intended to see the pictures in this book as an unmasking of images. He says all his photographs are straight, observational pictures, but each acknowledge the ways in which so much of the world is now made up of montages and collisions between the alluring spectacle of commercial images and their settings. As well as Baudrillard, whose own photography was fascinated with trompe l’oeil, Luigi Ghirri and Martin Parr are also relevant—Ghirri with his wry response to consumer culture’s pervasiveness and Parr’s more abrasive depictions of people caught amidst image clichés.
Only Derksen’s is a response to the greater intensification of the image world in urban spaces, the digital-borne ubiquity and proliferation of images that now can be reproduced on almost everything. A photograph from Cairo, for example, sets the back-end of a tourist coach, adorned with a flashy montage of pictures advertising the country’s attractions, against the foreground detail of the flaking grey-painted surface of a kiosk structure. It typifies the kind of formal collisions running through these pictures, the way in which hyped-up promotional appeal jars and collides with a situation and context that is dull and grey by comparison. The Cairo picture is however given another dimension and visual complication by the fact the image of one of the Pyramids on the coach is also grey as it is drained of color for contrast against the other colorful tourist images.
These digital globally widespread images often have a material presence in Derksen’s photographs. Their surfaces are not untouched or seamless, but often shown marked, damaged, peeled back, broken up. City dwellers crop up in the photographs, but are more incidental and inactive, often just going about their business, amidst the clamouring signage. In a photograph from Chongqing, among a series of facades bearing images showing architectural visions of city development, a solitary man appears to be caught absorbed in removing something from the metallic surface of the one screen that does not bear images. But there are no real signs of resistance and protest to the spectacle in this book. There is the violent graffiti scrawling over an image of a young woman in a picture taken in Bucharest, but this is dislocated from the figure of a man cutting between a car and the advertisement, head bowed.
The registration of the social real presents us with people’s dormancy and passivity, a certain obliviousness to the images that now fill their worlds. The action and animation seems to all be in the image world. Derksen is fascinated in showing us the fractures and disorientating effect of the theme park world of urban spaces, even going as far as to invert a few photographs in the book to further confuse us. But the way in which he photographs people in these cities means they neither compete with nor contest that image world. In one of the most charged juxtapositions, taken in Dubai, a worker is enmeshed by the cage trolley he is pushing and dwarfed by the orientalising image of a woman’s face behind him. Setting up a fantasy of sexual enslavement, the woman in the huge ad is adorned and eroticised with decorative chains, one of which suggestively runs through her mouth. All this is played out against the implied subservience and entrapment of the worker. The image spectacle is not undone or unmasked here, instead Derksen’s photograph shows how its allure and spell dominates and binds.
MARK DURDEN
Professor of Photography,
Director of the European Centre for Documentary Research,
Faculty of Creative Industrie.
Review is on www.Lensculture.com
Download
Today The Correspondent published a selection of my Disneyfication images as a part of Rob Wijnberg's article on; Truth be sold: How truth became a product by Rob Wijnberg, founding editor and a context article by Lise Straatsma, image editor.
THECORRESPONDENT.COM
Truth be sold: how truth became a product
In premodern times, truth offered hope of redemption in the afterlife. As modern society emerged, truth brought us hope of a better world for our descendants. In the postmodern era, truth freed us from false authorities and pretentious ideologies. But what does our own truth still aspire to achieve,...Rob Wijnberg.
DISNEYFICATION PUBLISHED IN WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/flimsy-veneer-gigantic-advertisements/
Disneyfication
has been chosen as one of the ten best photobooks in the Netherlands in 2019 by the Volkskrant.