Willem van den Hoed. Coming Home

Willem van den Hoed (1965) uses his keen eye to register images of special places all over the world. ‘I photograph what I want to see. Rooms, buildings, cities. I like situations that have ben crated by human hand. Constructions, parallel lines, reflections, coherent shadows and reliable vanishing points. In the cities I pass through and stay a while, a hotel room becomes a shelter, a cocoon.’ The temporary space feels like a challenging laboratory to him. It is a kind of crow’s nest, from which he observes the world. The most prominent theme in Van den Hoed’s work is the study of the contrast between the intimate ambience of a hotel room and the public exterior. The glass that divides these worlds plays a crucial role in this process.

For Van den Hoed, photography is the most important medium for creating a new, layered reality. This reality, in which his background as an architect is always apparent, does not appear to be manipulated, but every millimetre of the photo has been edited. The representation of the city, the buildings and the interior is accurate; the light on the other hand comes from hundreds of suns. 

Coming Home is a great, beautifully executed overview of Willem van den Hoed’s work. The title is a reference to his move from Seoul (South-Korea), where he lived for four years, to Amsterdam.