Black Is A Matter Of Taste

Works and opinions of Theo van Dusseldorp, “The past 35 years Theo van Dusseldorp has been both a product photographer and a teacher. Well over 1000 students followed his lessons at the KABK (Royal Academy of Art, The Hague). It is therefore fair to say that he is partly responsible for the technical quality of photography made in The Netherlands.

Although photography is traditionally considered a medium balancing art and technique, few publications explicitly show their mutual interaction. In this publication, Salvo addresses this hiatus. We articulate the intimate relation that exists between art and technique, between advertisement and science, between product and process, between sentiment and knowledge.

Between 1978 and 2001 Van Dusseldorp took over 25.000 Polaroids that he made as studies for his product photos. Initially, he donated many of them to elementary schools for children to play with. Later, at the dawn of the digital age, he felt like holding on to the Polaroids without exactly knowing why. They were recently given to Salvo and we were free to use them as we saw fit.”

A visual thesis in the form of many reproduced polaroids of household objects, foodstuff or people, sometimes scribbled on or altered in other ways, accompanied by a series of texts about Van Dusseldorp: reproduced correspondence, an interview, an essay, and selections from his lectures; No.4 of the periodical for photography published by the Dutch collective Salvo, active since 2013, the members of Salvo are Anne Geene, Arjan de Nooy, David de Jong, Sander Uitdehaag and Vincent van Baar, soft cover, 32 x 24 cm, 60 pages, The Hague/Amsterdam 2014

ISBN: 978-90-820291-2-3