GoSee Tip : ‘Outside Room 8’ by Lotte Bronsgeest & Geert Broertjes – an autobiografical story about cancer, told using experimental techniques of analog photography (Kehrer Publishing)
When Dutch photographer Geert Broertjes was diagnosed with cancer, his colleague Lotte Bronsgeest asked him if she could make a portrait of him while he was “still pure, without the presence of poisonous medicine in his body.” This was the start of the project ‘Outside Room 8’, in which Lotte and Geert used analog photography to visualize the experiences of a patient undergoing the three most common cancer treatments: chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery.
What makes it so unique: The duo subjected film rolls, negatives and prints to the same procedures that Geert’s body was enduring. Directly after the chemo, Geert’s urine was used to soak the film rolls. 4x5 inch film was irradiated at Amsterdam’s AMC hospital. The size of the illuminated square in the middle of the film represents Geert’s tumor of the same size. Partially burned negatives became stand-ins for surgical procedures, the trauma caused to the body by both the illness and ‘recovery’ – and eventually to the mind as well.
With this series, Geert and Lotte wanted to visualize what you go through as a patient, and the huge contradictions between the promises of a cure and the actual treatments. What is meant to heal also breaks you down. Above all, ‘Outside Room 8’ is about the harsh reality in which strength and vulnerability play the lead role and hope is the only constant factor to which one involuntary has to cling.
In this project, autobiographical interest conflates with an experimental tendency in photography in which chemical substances are no longer primarily used to improve the development and print of the perfect representation, a replica of what is seen, but as a means of adding metaphorical, procedural, aesthetic and expressive layers on top of that.
For the very personal and high-quality artist’s book, the renowned publishing house Kehrer chose a Japanese binding with ten fold-out pages (21x27 cm 128 pages, 114 color illustrations).
Lotte Bronsgeest and Geert Broertjes both graduated in 2013 from the Photo Academy in Amsterdam, where they had met. Today, they work as freelance photographers. Lotte Bronsgeest has always been interested in portraying awkward bodily conditions and experiments with double exposure photography, among other things. Geert Broertjes’ graduation project at the academy was ‘One Year’, his visual representation of a year in his life during which three of his family members deceased and he was also abandoned by his partner. The project gained much attention and has been published in book form.
‘Outside Room 8’ by Lotte Bronsgeest & Geert Broertjes
Texts: Jelle Bouwhuis, Geert Broertjes, Lotte Bronsgeest, Teun van der Heijden, Design: Teun van der Heijden, Heijdens Karwei.
GoSee lottebronsgeest.com & geertbroertjes.com & Vimeo Video from Kehrer Verlag
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