In 2009 the Amsterdam photography museum Huis Marseille was the first institution to devote attention to the new work by Dutch photographer Rob Nypels (1951) with the remarkable exhibition ‘Only Gaze a While Longer‘. Nypels lives and works in the Massif Central in the Auvergne region of France. He takes his surroundings as the starting point for a series of landscape photos that are innovative, especially in their imagery. He doesn’t want to record nature as something to absorb from a distance, but as something that you experience from within. In his experiments he explores the landscape, using the soft quality of the portrait lens to have it run together into an abstract and colourful whole. In ‘Illuminations’ – a title taken from the collection ‘Les Illuminations’ by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) – Nypels shifts his attention from the natural landscape to the urban space, in which the contours of streets, squares, a funfair or solitary objects in mysterious rooms are vaguely recognizable. Each photo image is like a dream, lighting up in the ‘garden of memory’.

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