The photographs of Ger Dekkers (Borne, 1929 – Zwolle, 2020) show the beauty of everyday scenes, such as a ditch that cuts through the landscape, a single cloud above a dyke, a freshly formed dune against an asphalt road or ploughed furrows in a potato field. But it is mainly the clean lines and patterns of the man-made land that Dekkers reveals. Through his lens, those patterns in the landscape almost become abstract-geometric compositions.
Turning around on the spot
Dekkers works in a manner just as orderly as the landscapes that he captures. He photographs his ‘landscape observations’ with a well-defined intention. He chooses a position, sets the frame, and takes a predetermined number of shots. While taking the photographs, he turns around on the spot, moves a number of steps for each shot, or takes a section of the horizon as a fixed point in the image and moves with his camera in such a way that this section is always visible from a slightly different angle.
Horizon
For Planned Landscapes - 25 Horizons (1977) he photographs twenty-five carefully selected landscapes, mostly in Flevoland, but also in Friesland, Noord-Holland and Zeeland. Dekkers photographs the landscapes in series of seven. He then rearranges the photographs, whereby the horizon always occupies the centre of the image and thus makes the series into a whole. Occasionally Dekkers reveals his presence during the process: his shadow is visible in one of the photographs.