Together with the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Lecturis is publishing Starring Chas Gerretsen. This monograph tells the extraordinary life story of Charles (Chas) Gerretsen (1943), an exceptional photographer. In addition to working as a war reporter in Asia, he also worked as a photographer in Hollywood, where he photographed the set of the film classic ‘Apocalypse Now’ and many film stars in their early years. The photography of Chas Gerretsen, whose life story reads like an exciting book, is still hardly known in the Netherlands. Growing up in Groningen, he quickly sought adventure as an eighteen-year-old.
The book is published on the occasion of the first retrospective exhibition of his oeuvre, a world first! The exhibition of the same name Starring Chas Gerretsen can be seen in the Nederlands Fotomuseum from 15 October 2021 to 22 April 2022. With this, the Nederlands Fotomuseum is realizing for the first time an exhibition and publication by a Collection Photographer who is still alive. His special archive was acquired in 1995 and in recent years work has been done on organizing the archive and digitizing it. A process to which Chas Gerretsen and his partner Monika Pfandzelter have made a very valuable contribution by sharing all the stories with the Nederlands Fotomuseum.
Starring Chas Gerretsen is the second monograph in an ongoing series on the Collection of the Nederlands Fotomuseum. Previously published publications: Sterke verhalen, Rotterdam Works!, Gallery of Honour of Dutch Photography, and the monograph From Peking to Paris about Ellen Thorbecke.
