Ruud van Empel’s composites push the boundaries of what can be considered traditional photography, but lay bare the boundless possibilities that can be realised with imagination
Daisy McCorgray
Chances are you’ve experienced the uncanny work of Dutch photographic artist Ruud van Empel before. With his highly polished mixture of contemporary art and photography, he uses hallucinatory Edenic settings and portrayals of childhood to challenge the viewer’s perception of reality.
INITIALLY trained as a graphic designer, Ruud van Empel has been creating visual art since the mid-1990s. His best known collection is undoubtedly the provocative ‘World’ series that uses photo collage to depict black children in various states of immaculate dress, immersed in a tropical paradise. The images have a sense of unease about them, as though the beauty of nature has been restructured. This is achieved through digital collage, a technique that van Empel favours over the single image for its ability to challenge the viewer. “In Photoshop I can place everything in the frame at exactly the place I want to have it,” he says. “I have total control over the picture so I can create a new reality; a world of fantasy that looks realistic.”
His recent solo exhibition at London’s Beetles + Huxley continued the exploration of lost childhood innocence set against the same backdrop of cultural conservatism we saw in the ‘World’ series. His ‘Mood’ images also push the boundaries of what would be considered photography, and our perceptions of reality, with digitally constructed images comprising hundreds of photographs. They’re the result of “about two years’ non-stop” work. “These are simple portraits, and the simplicity of them was important to me,” van Empel says of the evolution. “My other works are mostly with a lot of background and details. This time I wanted to keep it a very simple but strong composition so the attention goes to the small details in the face and the hair instead of the jungles behind my other work.” Van Empel has created another mysterious series where the children’s dark skin tones help to keep the images very dark. This was important to the project: “That is where the tension was for me, that was my challenge, playing with light.”
The process for creating the collages is an organic one, often beginning with a simple sketch of an idea that develops throughout the process. It takes “from two weeks to sometimes three months” to complete an image from the multitude of photos, shot on his Canon 5D, that are present in the finished work. “It is a technique I developed by cutting and pasting the details into hundreds of layers, that way the image is slowly building to an idea,” explains van Empel. �
