Exhibitions

The Unintentional Swim

On show in: The National Maritime Museum

With the photography exhibition Rescuers at sea The Maritime Museum celebrates 200 years of the Dutch Sea Rescue Institution (KNRM). The exhibition highlights volunteers of the KNRM and shows who these people are.

Rescuers at Sea

On Show in: The National Maritime Museum

Waters and more

Waters and more - Musea Zutphen

Op 1 februari 1953 vond de grootste Nederlandse natuurramp van de 20e eeuw plaats. Een zware noordwesterstorm in combinatie met springtij zorgde voor een overstroming van grote delen van Nederland. Op meer dan 150 plaatsen in Zeeland, Zuid-Holland en Noord-Brabant braken de dijken.
Goeree-Overflakkee is een van de gebieden die het zwaarst is getroffen als gevolg van de ramp. Oude-Tonge telt het grootste aantal slachtoffers. Van de in totaal 1836 slachtoffers stierven er 492 op het eiland. Ook het vee werd getroffen.

De gemeente Goeree-Overflakkee vroeg Robin de Puy, die opgroeide in Oude-Tonge om bewoners van het eiland te portretteren die de ramp hebben meegemaakt of zijn opgegroeid in de schaduw van het trauma dat hun (groot)ouders hebben overleefd.
Maria Barnas schreef de verhalen op van de mensen die de rampzalige nacht en de dagen erna hebben meegemaakt. Voor sommige mensen was het onmogelijk om over de ramp te praten. Het woord ’trauma’ bestond nog niet.

Waters kan gezien worden als een duidelijk signaal om niet weg te kijken van klimaatverandering en de snel stijgende waterspiegel. De Puy en Barnas proberen deze tragedie, die vaak in eenzaamheid werd gedragen, voor te stellen als iets wederzijds.

Randy - Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht

26.01.2018 - 13.05.2018
An intimate portrait of a boy growing up in Ely, Nevada.
Robin de Puy is presenting this portrait of Randy from 26 January till 13 May 2018 in the Bonnefantenmuseum in the form of an installation that comprises photos and film.

If This Is True... 8000 miles of a motorcycle in the USA. - The Hague museum of Photography

03.19.2016 — 06.26.2016
The Hague museum of Photography
“I do not want to go back – no launch parties or openings anymore. Wearing the same pair of jeans every day, feeling the sun on my skin and deciding whether I will stay or go on the day itself. I also love that everything I own here fits into two saddle bags and a backpack.”
Robin de Puy’s thoughts, jotted down in her journal on 4 June 2015. At that point, she had been in America for four weeks and covered 4908 km on her Harley-Davidson. Another six weeks and 5092 km to go. De Puy is a young portrait photographer in great demand. In 2014, she decided to go on the trip as a way of escaping the pressure of public expectations. Her success has a downside: the constant flood of commissions leaves her almost no time for autonomous work and she feared losing her sense of creative freedom. Her American road trip gave her the chance to go back to deciding for herself what to photograph.
The result is a splendid series of portraits, now presented by the Hague Museum of Photography in the photographer’s first ever solo show in a museum setting.
Robin de Puy is currently one of the Netherlands’ most popular portrait photographers. Her career took off immediately after she graduated from the Fotoacademie. Her Girls in Prostitution series won her the Photo Academy Award for the best final year project of 2009. She went on to win the Dutch National Portrait Prize in 2013 for a photograph of fellow-photographer An-Sofie Kesteleyn, who was seriously ill at the time. Both prizes were presented at ceremonies held in the Hague Museum of Photography, creating a particularly warm relationship between the photographer and the museum. The main clients commissioning De Puy’s work are Dutch magazines LINDA and Vrij Nederland and the Volkskrant newspaper. She has recently added international clients like Bloomberg Businessweek and New York Magazine to her CV.
De Puy set off across America in May 2015. Her most vital equipment was in her saddlebags: a couple of lamps, two cameras and a lighting umbrella. She followed no set route but toured the country looking for distinctive faces to photograph – people of all ages and both sexes whom she just happened to meet on her travels. She specifically did not want to record social contrasts or the antithesis between urban America and the country’s endless empty spaces. Robin de Puy’s work adds a new dimension to the classic genre of the American Photographic Road Trip, most famously practised by people like Robert Frank, Jacob Holdt and Alec Soth: her sympathetic portraits could have been taken anywhere between Washington, Warsaw and Vladivostok.
DOCUMENTARY
The first week of Robin de Puy’s trip was recorded by documentary filmmaker Simone de Vries (who had earlier made films about Rutger Hauer and Erik Kessels) and cameraman Maarten van Rossem. Halfway through the trip, they rejoined her for another week. The resulting documentary will be broadcast by AVROTROS on Sunday 20 March.
PUBLICATION
The exhibition comes with an English-language publication entitled If this is true, I’ll never have to leave home again. The book will contain extracts from De Puy’s journal and be designed by SYB. Issued by Belgian publishers Ludion, it will be priced at € 39.90.

Maastricht University, Tapijnkazerne

On Monday, the artwork of photographer Robin de Puy was unveiled in the renovated carré building at the Tapijnkazerne. It is a gallery of portraits - including those of Maastricht students - that together should express the diversity that Maastricht University stands for. The photos are printed on the thirty-meter long awning that hangs in front of the glass facade at the entrance.
De Puy came to Maastricht in January to take pictures of students in the Bonnefanten Museum and at UM Sport. Earlier, she already photographed a pregnant woman and a 90-year-old. “These portraits must together form a kind of lifeline,” De Puy said at the time. “I usually start with a form. Then I’m going to fill it in with faces. I always think it’s a bit like sculpting.”
To see the final series, please click here.