MART ENGELEN:
The Decisive Moment

Photographs by Mart Engelen © Mart Engelen
Text by Jac Veeger

For this edition, Mart Engelen has made a selection of his work, choosing the photographs most dear to him. They represent a visual walk through Mart’s career, with a main focus on portraits. Although Mart applies the medium of photography to a variety of genres—landscapes, travel and art—portraiture represents the core of his work. As Matthias Harder, curator of the Helmut Newton Museum in Berlin, stated in his introduction to Mart’s show there, making a portrait is a complicated game:

“The intensity of expression conveyed in these portraits of diverse personalities often reaches beyond their public role. Occasionally, we encounter a direct confrontation between the subject and the photographer: portrait photography involves an intuitive and intellectual showdown, a kind of give and take that is at its best and most intense when a look into the eyes reveals the soul – which, in turn, the subject might parry with a deft protective stance. In such cases, good portraits can be both informative and insightful for the viewer. […] There is something special that stands out in Engelen’s visual depiction of his subjects, something that the experienced viewer can feel, but not always capture in words. Perhaps it is this inimitable combination of confidence and vulnerability that we come to fathom in his work.”

Shooting portraits is an artistic endeavour often guided by conventions, so finding a way to make a portrait stand out requires special skill and experience. For example, Mart’s portrait of William Dafoe against a black background demonstrates his intuition for achieving a particular result. Mart allows Dafoe to present himself to the viewer. The harsh, uncompromising sharpness of the image reveals Dafoe as he is—with wrinkles, unpolished and real—strengthening the connection the viewer feels with him. In his selection, Mart juxtaposes pictures that tell us something about what he wanted to achieve. The picture of a young man in a dinner jacket in a ballroom, next to one of a much older man similarly dressed, shows us the ephemerality of life, but also its beauty and vulnerability. Pictures like these show the photographer’s true skill and artistry: taking the right shot at the right moment. Or, as Cartier-Bresson put it: “[…] the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” Enjoy Mart’s visual walk of life. You will find that he knows his game and that he can take “the right shot at the right moment”.

Jac Veeger