Journal Article

The mass ornament revisited: reading from Hans Eijkelboom's Photo Notes

Roelstraete, Dieter

2011

Overview

Roelstraete singles out one source of anxiety in the cauldron of orientalist fantasies, the spectral terror of oriental sameness, of repetition on a mass, industrialised scale, or, in other words, fear of numbers, in relation to the work of Hans Eijkelboom, a Dutch photo-artist who was born in 1949. In 2007, Eijkelboom published \"Paris-New York-Shanghai\", a selection of 1,218 photographs taken in the title's locations in the closing years of his \"Photo Notes\" project, which lasted from 8 November 1992 to 8 November 2007. Eijkelboom's China, that bewildering empire of the numbers, is as much a site of difference as it is a site of sameness, just like every other culture in the globalized capitalist world. In all three cities, the same precarious balance between difference and sameness, articulated by the way people dress and comport themselves in public, persists. However it be, the ancient Western fear of the oriental sameness, really a fear of numbers, here appears assuaged by the seemingly benign differentiating effects of global capitalism. Seen through Eijkelboom's lens, the rise of China that is so often the source of all kinds of xenophobic anxieties becomes a rather more colourful, comical affair, a carnival of subtle, nearly imperceptible differences.