/ Paesi Bassi · Netherlands
From A12 series #2, 2023
photography, video art, performance
first prize
Photography as an element of the revelation of
human relationships and systems symbolic: the
roaring of water that destroys the sharpness of
the image is an archetypal element that at once
represents danger, alarm, drama, conflict, but also
celebration, ritual, fertility, refreshment, liberation.
Eli Dijkers (1978) was born and raised in the Netherlands.
After a doctorate in Pharmacy, he decided to graduate from
thea Rotterdam Academy of Photography in 2012. Winner
of, among others, Ilford Master 2018 with Sebastião Salgado,
he has exhibited in China, in the United States, and in
many countries in Europe. In Italy we recalls the exhibition
Strangers and strangeness at Palazzo Malvinni Malvezzi (2021),
together with Henri-Cartier Bresson on the occasion of the
G20 foreign ministers’ summit in Matera: he represented the
last of the great photoreporters who transited Basilicata from
its “discovery” in the modern era to the threshold of Matera
European capital of culture 2019. Among his references
are Daido Moriyama, Trent Parke and Michael Ackerman,
specialists in an expressionist black and white that makes light
material and mellow. In the images for Map3 we have an essay
of Dijkers’ love for photography as an element of revelation
of human relationships and systems symbolic: the roaring of
water that destroys the sharpness of the image is an archetypal
element that at once represents danger, alarm, drama, conflict,
but also celebration, ritual, fertility, refreshment, liberation.