Dennis van Doorn
You ain’t gonna believe this no matter how carefully I explain
it. But I’ll give it a try because it might be worth your time. If
not, forget it and move onto the next chapter. You don’t have to stick
around for this. Maybe you got better things to do. But, just maybe you’re
interested. Your curiosity is piqued. You’ve seen someone you recognise
and you want to know what they’re doing at this moment. Truly, in
your heart of hearts, you’re wondering what the hell Mickey Rourke
is doing right now. And if not Mickey, then Uma or Ellen or Nina or Julianne
or David or Milla or some journalist with a greedy grin from the Daily Telegraph.
So, surely you have a second or two to peel yourself away from that accounting job of yours to open a can of imported beer, or pour yourself an expensive glass of Lafitte Rothschild, flick on “Entertainment Tonight”, take out your Hello magazine, look over your People Magazine, log onto the New York Social Diary, peruse the Hollywood Reporter and closely study the words and images of the New York Post Page 6. After all, it’s your personal cultural duty to Western society and your obligation as a member of Western conspicuous consumption. You have the time.
You see, at some point, you’re going to want to compare your delusions of grandeur, fantasies involving silk lingerie, daydreams with martinis, casual brushes with stardom and lusty loose distractions with photographer Dennis van Doorn. You’ll be a wanton traveller on his disorienting odyssey into the vampire-rich smiles of the material wealthy and the utterly famous while they prance around on the public and private stages of their lives. Here, Van Doorn gets us in and out of places where our human desires, avarice and mortal failures breathe new life amid cocktail aromas, camera flashes, new hairdos, and the stylishly appropriate cigarette smoke.
You may not be ready for it, but Van Doorn will make you want to burn your old celebrity scrap book and swipe his. He gets in and out and in and in and in and in and out. In the process, he manages to steal a bit of that other world and bring it back to us like a severed head on a platter, some kind of soup of the day that we can taste once and then maybe, if we’re lucky, order and taste again a few weeks from now. It’s quick. It’s furious. It’s demonic. But then, so is his subject matter. His photographs have a way of reflecting that.
You begin to wonder, where does it all start? How does it happen. Well, it starts somewhere before the images you get to see, in fact, somewhere just before the photographs you are now grasping in your pink little fingers with your body temperature rising like a teenager about to lose her virginity. It begins somewhere with the quiet giggle of possibility, an invitation to a party, or an opening, or a premiere, or a casting session, or a press conference, or an awards banquet, or a ceremony, or a tribute, or a party in honour of someone in the throes of fame. A moment with those who command privilege. A peek at people with notoriety. You know, the people we go to the movies to see, or read magazines in order to disgust us, inspire us, or, perhaps, test the depths of our jealousy. It starts there, in the way Van Doorn enters, cast afloat in the wonderland of celebrity, mishap, fascination, beauty, and disregarded or carefully guarded, lost and regained reputation. It’s where Van Doorn brings his camera. Lucky for us.
After the appointment has been made, the pass arranged and the order given, the ravenous eye is given free range to have a curious look inside the daze of this can-this-really-be-happening climate created by popular culture. Van Doorn seems as perplexed as the rest of us mortals by the shenanigans going on around the gold and crystal palaces. A rock star glances one way and she looks familiar. She’s older now, still beautiful but ageing. A last vestige of her signature looks clings desperately to the whim of the camera as if to say, yes, Nina Hagen is alive and well.
The composition is as quick and relentless as we are in our instinctual craving to see it all in action. We want to know what these people do back there, in there, with each other. We wonder how fame looks when it is not in a music video or on a movie screen or in a magazine editorial. How does fame behave? How does fame laugh? How does fame get drunk? How does fame make a fool of itself? Van Doorn shows us.
The photographs themselves are made without any formal fear or restriction regarding photography. They are shot by instinct and gut inspiration. They are a visual fling or one-night stand. Each image is a nuclear flash-like glimpse at someone out there breathing in the ether. Van Doorn puts you in there. He translates you there. He snatches you away to that place and, although they are photographs, they are loud exciting objects to look at. They scream with delight. Like over-sugared candy bars, you eat them in rapid succession until your teeth are caked with powder.
The confrontation between the image of Ellen von Unwerth and another adorned party freak who holds his fingers in front of his eyes creates a brief summation. Van Doorn is caught between them. He captures that realm somewhere between massive interest and utter disgust, between adoration and ridicule. The two photographs play off each other as the viewer and the viewed; neither one is very different from the other. The question for Van Doorn in the end is whether, as a photographer, he is merely caught in the intriguing cross-fire of this other planet, or is he bringing these images back to a more primal reality for us to examine soberly. This remains to be seen. Perhaps it’s for us to decide. But maybe that’s the point and we should just cut loose, and join him as fellow astronauts in his anthropological study of that other place called Hipland-Spacewonder!
TEXT BY TYLER WHISNAND
