Hans Eijkelboom

Hans Eijkelboom was born in 1949 in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and came of age during a period when the boundaries between fine art and photography, between conceptual practice and documentary tradition, were being radically redrawn. He studied at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Arnhem and emerged in the early 1970s as a conceptual artist whose primary medium happened to be photography. His earliest works were performative self-portraits in which he adopted the clothing, hairstyles, and postures of different social types — a businessman, a labourer, a hippie — photographing himself in each guise to explore how identity is constructed through outward appearance. These early experiments established the twin preoccupations that would define his career: the relationship between individuality and conformity, and the role of clothing and consumer goods in the construction of social identity.

In 1992, Eijkelboom began what would become his life's work: the Photo Notes, a vast, ongoing project in which he stands on busy shopping streets in cities around the world and photographs passersby who are wearing similar items of clothing or carrying similar accessories. Each session is conducted according to a strict set of rules: he selects a specific location, stands in the same spot for a fixed period (typically one to two hours), and photographs everyone who passes wearing a particular type of garment — a striped shirt, a camouflage jacket, a pair of Ugg boots, a North Face parka. The resulting images are then arranged in grids, typically twelve to twenty photographs per page, organised by date, time, and location.

The cumulative effect of the Photo Notes is both comic and unsettling. When viewed individually, each passerby appears to be exercising personal choice in their dress; when viewed in aggregate, the images reveal an extraordinary degree of uniformity. The project makes visible what we normally fail to see — that our supposedly individual choices in clothing and consumption are in fact deeply patterned, shaped by the invisible forces of advertising, fashion cycles, and social conformity. The grid format, borrowed from the typological tradition of August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher, strips away the context of individual identity and reveals the underlying pattern with devastating clarity.

Eijkelboom has conducted Photo Notes sessions in cities across the globe — Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, Berlin, Istanbul — and the project functions as a record not only of consumer culture but of globalisation itself. The same brands, the same garments, the same accessories appear on the streets of wildly different cities, documenting the homogenisation of visual culture across national and cultural boundaries. At the same time, local variations persist, and the attentive viewer can read in Eijkelboom's grids subtle differences of climate, economy, and cultural attitude that distinguish one city from another.

The Photo Notes project culminated in several major publications, most notably People of the Twenty-First Century (2014), a monumental book that presented thousands of images organised chronologically across more than five hundred pages. The title was a deliberate echo of August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century, the great typological portrait project of Weimar-era Germany, and the comparison was not merely playful. Like Sander, Eijkelboom is creating a portrait of an era through its people, but where Sander photographed individuals in their working clothes and social roles, Eijkelboom photographs consumers in their purchased identities, producing a portrait of an age defined not by what people do but by what they buy.

Beyond the Photo Notes, Eijkelboom has produced a substantial body of conceptual photographic work, including early performance pieces, text-based works, and series that examine the conventions of photography itself. He has exhibited widely at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His work occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of street photography, conceptual art, and social documentary — a practice that uses the simplest of photographic means to reveal some of the most profound truths about contemporary consumer society.