Jip Moors and his father Holly went to the volunteer-run botanical garden in Haren and asked each volunteer, “which is your favourite spot”. This led to an album of 16 photos by Jip Moors. Father Holly interviewed the volunteers and wrote the accompanying text.

The hortus botanica contains amongst others a Chinese garden, a rock garden, an apple orchard and a bamboo forest.

The Hortus Haren was founded in 1626 in Groningen by pharmacist Henry Munting, out of necessity—he got sent plants from all over Europe by colleagues and he needed a place to put them. Munting’s knowledge of plants grew enormously and at 1654 at age 71 he even became the first botany professor of the republic. Later, the Muntings had to sell the garden to the state because they couldn’t afford the upkeep, but they were hired for generations to tend the garden.

In 1917 the garden was moved to the nearby town of Haren because it was growing too large. The owners wanted to add new greenhouses for which there was no room at the inner city location. Currently the garden occupies 200,000 square metres.

(Photo: Jip Moors)

Public swimming pool Tropicana was built in 1988 on the Maasboulevard in the heart of Rotterdam and closed its doors again in 2010.

The Vers Beton blog asked photographer Frank Hanswijk to go and take a peek, which he did. He created a short photo reportage in which he documents the rapid deterioration of an abandoned public pool. In as short a time as three years the water has receded and most of the plants have died, and in their stead rust and dirt are conquering every inch.

In the 1980s tropical themed public pools became popular in the Netherlands—at least in my recollection. These pools focussed less on lap swimming and more on other types of recreation. They were typically equipped with water slides, whirl pools, wave pools and so on, and were nicknamed subtropische zwemparadijzen.

(Link: Trendbeheer. Photo: Frank Hanswijk.)

Normann Szkop is a French photographer living in Brussels. Two years ago he convinced an Irish pilot living in the Netherlands, Claython Pender, to fly him over the tulip fields of Anna Paulowna (a place, not a person) near the tip of North Holland.

The colourful results can be admired at Szkop’s Flickr page. Szkop took almost 100 photos from the air and several from the ground.

Although Anna Paulowna is a town, it is named after a person, namely the wife of king Willem II and daughter of tsar Paul I of Russia, Анна Павловна.

(Link: The Verge. Photo: Normann Szkop)

Everybody has some sort of party on New Year’s Eve, but what to do on New Year’s Day when you live in the capital and the town gets too quiet? Make going to a museum with friends and family a New Year’s resolution. Or there’s also the zoo, catching a film and some other tourist attractions.

The year 2013 will be a special year for Amsterdam as the city celebrates several milestones. The refurbished Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum will reopen, the Artis Royal Zoo will celebrate its 175th anniversary and the Amsterdam Canal Ring will celebrate its 400th jubilee.

Rijksmuseum (11 am – 5 pm)
Hermitage Amsterdam (including Van Gogh Museum exhibition) (11 am – 5 pm)
Foam (noon – 6 pm)
Stedelijk Museum (11 am – 5 pm)
Museum of the Canals (10 am – 5 pm)
Anne Frank House (noon – 7 pm)
Jewish Historical Museum (opens at noon)
EYE Film Institute Netherlands (opens at 1 pm)
Artis Royal Zoo (10 am – 8 pm)
Madame Tussauds (opens at noon)

(Link: www.dutchdailynews.com, Illustration: the Van Gogh that was ‘discovered’ last year)

Gemonde is a small, cosy village in Noord-Brabant, just South of Maaskantje*, and bordered by the Dommel river**, which is where landscape photographer Robert-Paul Jansen takes his pictures.

Landscape photographers often want to bring along the biggest cameras they can find just to capture all that detail, but Jansen likes to use his Apple iPhone 4. Last week he told DPReview: “Smartphones typically have the largest viewfinders of all cameras, and this is ideal for taking landscape photos. Composition is key in landscape photography and a large viewfinder helps me to compose the shot easily. There are some limitations, like a lack of a true wide angle lens and zoom, but these things can be compensated for by using the right apps [for stitching photos together].”

I guess that the weight and size of the iPhone are also a consideration.

Besides an iPhone Jansen also uses more ‘serious’ cameras, as you can see on his blog.

*) Of the TV series.
**) Of the beer.

(Photo: Robert-Paul Jansen)

I learnt somewhere during my university years that children are seen as a generic group of humans. Then boys and girls and men and women are defined separately because they are sexually active. Eventually when women become infertile (they are the benchmark) both men and women are referred to as the elderly, going back to being a generic group of humans.

This set of photographs of mainly elderly people seems to back up my story. Dutch photographer George Maas took pictures of couples, men and women who are dressed almost alike. The last five years he managed to photograph 56 couples of all kinds.

I wonder if elderly gays and lesbians are inclined to follow suit (ha, pun).

(Link: www.jut-en-jul.nl, via www.iamexpat.nl)

Jan-Dirk van der Burg curated an exhibition called Censorship Daily which is on display now at the Persmuseum.

It shows the handiwork of Iran’s censors with regards to Dutch newspapers. NRC has a selection at their Inbeeld website.

Van der Burg is a photographer whom we wrote about before.

A new series of charity stamps (‘kinderpostzegels’), which are sold door to door by school children raising money for poor kids in poor countries , will feature the ‘Triple AAA’, aka Princesses Amalia, Alexia and Ariane, the daughters of Prince Willem Alexander and Princess Máxima. The Triple AAA joke was said by the Prince himself once, we can’t take credit for that.

Starting 26 September, one of the 200,000 school children who sell these stamps will ring my neighbour’s door bell and sell him pics of the young blonde Dutch royals. In November, the stamps will be available for purchase at the post office.

(Link and photo: binnenland.nieuws.nl)

The name may be a bit unfortunate—rot means the same thing in Dutch as it does in English—but what were they to do?

They being three artists who post their own odes to the women of Rotterdam each week at Rotterdames.net, creating a vivid cross section of the second-largest city of the Netherlands in the process. Baschz is the sketch artist, Milan Boonstra the photographer and Janjoost Jullens the writer of the website.

According to De Weekkrant, the artists have already published more than 100 odes and are well on their way to their goal of 156 odes.

The news site quotes Janjoost Jullens about what makes the women of Rotterdam so special: “They are real, more real than anywhere else. They do not need to be pretty in a model kind of way. In Amsterdam the ladies look beautiful from a distance, but when you get closer you see it is all fake. In Rotteram what you see is what you get. We would like to thank the women of Rotterdam for that. Our odes are really a sort of ‘thank you’.”

And in that spirit I would like to tip my hat to Rotterdame Astrid Oosenburg for telling me about this initiative.

They used to exist, books in which people pasted prints of pictures they had taken.

Now that we’ve landed firmly in the digital age, in which prints appear to be the sole domain of ‘pixel peepers’ and newly-weds, Erik Kessels (him of In Almost Every Picture) has curated an exhibition at FOAM in Amsterdam that puts the photo album in the spotlight once again.

Writes FOAM:

Album Beauty is an ode to the vanishing era of the photo album as told through the collection of Erik Kessels (1966, The Netherlands). Once commonplace in every home, the photo album has been replaced by the digital age where images live online and on hard drives.

Photo albums were once a repository for family history, often representing a manufactured family as edited for display. They speak of birth, death, beauty, sexuality, pride, happiness, youth, competition, exploration, complicity and friendship. Album Beauty is an exhibition about the visual anthropology of the photo album.

Walking through the exhibition will be like leafing through a photo album. Erik Kessels is known for his unorthodox manner of installation and Album Beauty is no exception. On display will be hundreds of photo albums, all telling different but familiar stories. Some albums will be exaggerated in size and exhibited as wallpaper while others will be displayed in their original format. There will be interactive albums to flip through and life size cut outs for the viewer to walk around. Album Beauty features the endless formats of analogue photography many of which are no longer manufactured as well.

The exhibition will run from June 29 to October 14.

(Photo: FOAM)