Annie van Gemert (1958, Vught) specializes in interiors, portraits, and staged documentary photography. She graduated with a degree in photography from AKI in Enschede in 1990.
Portraits and interiors play an important role in the photos. Her photography publications include: Uniformity – Girls’ Boarding Schools in Flanders (1997); Many Children – Large Families in the Netherlands and Flanders (2002); A Summer at Sea (2003); Monks (2006) and Boys and Girls (2009). For this last book, she won second place in the World Press Photo competition in the portrait category.
Since 1990, Annie van Gemert has become known as a photographer with a predilection for worlds that are on the brink of disappearing or, as in the case of this new series, changing. Driven by her curiosity about lives that play out, to a large extent, behind closed doors, she has created photo series about girls’ schools, teenagers’ rooms, monasteries, and large families. Typically, she follows and observes these closed worlds for years. The identity and relationship of the subject of the portrait with his or her environment are central. The children look intently into the camera, and the background and composition are of equal importance. The stately architecture of the historic school buildings, the classrooms, gym, cafeteria, chapel, corridors, staircases or enclosed schoolyards forms the backgrounds against which boys and girls from different cultures come together. The big question this new series raises is how wearing a school uniform – group identity – is related to the development of individual identity. Equally, the series asks how the school uniform can bridge different social and cultural backgrounds.
