Eggs and Rarities

Art Paper Editions / Dashwood Books / FOMU, 2018.
Edition of 2,000 copies.
Linen hardcover, silver foil edging, 172 pp., b/w illustrated, 240 x 310 mm. Photographs by Paul Kooiker. Design by 6'56''

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.

This publication coincided with the solo exhibition UNTITLED (NUDE)
at FOMU – Photography Museum Antwerp, June 29 – October 7, 2018