Rotterdam (Part 3) – Eurotrip

7 Mar

Rotterdam has been the cultural hotspot, the reverberating ground for new musical advances or art and avant-garde fashion. The Fantastische Fotografie Exhibition at Historisch Museum Rotterdam showcases the forgotten realities of Rotterdam and its revolutionaries, visionaries and dreamers, who left their mark culturally both inside and outside Rotterdam.

Fantastische Fotografie, De Rotterdam School

As the Museum describes in its description of this exhibition, that in the 80′s, a group of artists and photographers decided that they would no longer use their camera as instruments that recorded the actual reality. Instead they started to create their own surreal images that the world had never seen before. Photographers became creative explorers who moulded reality to create new realities, thus starting a new movement in photography known as ‘Staged Photography’.

Elvis Presley (Courtesy: FF, Historisch Museum Rotterdam)

Staged Photography (Courtesy: FF, Historisch Museum Rotterdam)

Photographers from all over the world joined this movement but since majority of the photographers were from Rotterdam, this movement was given its name ‘Rotterdamse School’. This movement intertwined its interests with other disciplines such as graphic design, music, theatre and plastic arts.