Gerard Petrus Fieret - Copyright G.P. Fieret - 2016

“I want to have it all. There are no failed photographs.” - Gerard Fieret

Almost no other body of photography is as strange and idiosyncratic as that of Gerard Fieret (1924-2009). This outstanding photographer was an obsessive recorder of everything that came his way: people, animals, street scenes and himself. Most especially, however, he loved to photograph women – models, students, young mothers, dancers and waitresses – or just parts of their bodies, such as breasts, feet or long legs, in isolation. Although his non-stop photographic activities were concentrated into a period of just ten years (1965-1975), Gerard Fieret generated an enormous oeuvre. In the Netherlands he is seen as a pioneer of photography as a form of autonomous visual art. Over recent years his work has also attracted increasing international interest. Even so, he is less well-known to the general public than contemporaries like Paul Huf and Ed van der Elsken. In collaboration with the Le Bal photographic centre in Paris, the Hague Museum of Photography is now holding the first major monographic exhibition on Gerard Fieret since his death.

In career terms, Gerard Fieret was often his own worst enemy. Wim van Sinderen, curator at the Hague Museum of Photography, recalls countless unheralded visits by Fieret. He would drop in to stealthily add his signature to works already in the collection, call past to donate bin bags stuffed with photographs or come to deliver long, hand-written letters full of paranoid accusations. Fieret was equally capricious concerning the preparation of exhibitions and publications, interfering in such a way as to make life almost impossible for curators and publishers. Nevertheless, the Hague Museum of Photography managed to organise a major exhibition in honour of his eightieth birthday in 2004 and in 2010 the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag acquired his estate. The possessions he left comprised around a thousand different objects, including two jerry cans filled with hundreds of negatives previously believed to be lost. The acquisition expanded the museum’s already large Fieret collection to total approximately 2500 objects and photographs. In addition to images from that collection, the forthcoming exhibition will include photographs on loan from private collectors, the Special Collections of Leiden University Library, Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Kahmann Gallery in Amsterdam and Deborah Bell Photographs in New York.