Geert Kooiman

Geert Kooiman was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. For twelve years he worked in commercial photography for advertising agencies, creating campaigns for BMW and Unilever and contributing to publications including Avenue in the Netherlands and Twen in Germany. In 1972 he left commercial work to produce a series of full-page portraits for the newspaper NRC, followed by thirty portraits of classical musicians and conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Maurizio Pollini, Alfred Brendel, and Jessye Norman. This series entered the collection of the Opéra Garnier in Paris.

From 1990 onward, Kooiman moved away from documentary photography and portraiture toward still lifes, interiors, and exteriors, developing what he calls his private collection SILENCED MATTER. Two books followed: Tijdgeest in 2004 and Revelations in 2007, both published by Author House. Beginning in 2011, he reintroduced old photographs of people into his work, notably in the triptychs titled Of the Visible and the Invisible. From 2012, he began The Jubelsenior, later renamed The Sleepwalker, a project consisting of twenty-one photographs mounted on a single panel, which he completed in 2018 and also presented as a video and as 575 photographs arranged as a film.

His work has been exhibited widely, including at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (1992, 1995, 2013), the Letterkundig Museum in Den Haag (1990), and galleries in France, Italy, and Spain. His portrait collection of classical musicians was acquired by the Opéra Garnier in Paris.