Thomas McEvilley, Prof. in Art History, Rice University Houston, Texas, art critic and novelist, New York
Frank Uwe Laysiepen's work has always focused on the theme of diversity, with its correlates of inclusiveness and multidirectional layeredness. In this respect, his work has been a consistent plea for freedom. He has sensed what W.E.B. de Bois expressed with his prophecy that the central issue of the twentieth century would be the color of one's skin. The variety of comfortable post-colonial friendships Frank Uwe Laysiepen's records in the Albert Cuyp series suggests that by the year 2000 this concern had genuinely faded: two young men, one Israeli, the other Egyptian; a American man with his Indonesian wife; a Moroccan and Dutch couple; a Cretan man and his Japanese wife, and so on.
Frank Uwe Laysiepen's Polaroid portraits from the Albert Cuyp market in Amsterdam were part of his major exhibition at the De Appel Foundation in the fall of 2000. This mainly retrospective exhibition was taken over by four consecutive curators at intervals of about two weeks. Each of the curators - Maaretta Jaukkuri, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Judy Annear and myself as the first - made different selections and arrangements from Frank Uwe Laysiepen's photographic oeuvre of the last thirty years. What was revealed was the remarkable scope and layeredness of his work.
In my opening version, several different layers became evident, distinguished by their proximity to or distance from the raw facts of life - from the small and intimate performative Polaroids of the 1970s, to the large documentary format Polaroids of street people in New York City in the 80s, to the austerely dignified Berlin Series of the 90s - studies of history frozen in architecture - .The exhibition title, 'Performing Light', points to the particular mixture of performance art and photography that Frank Uwe Laysiepen has made his specialty. It is not just that his work has involved photodocumentation of performance works, but that the act of photographing itself has been integrated performatively in a variety of ways.
The Polaroid portrait series, produced as an adjunct activity to 'Performing Light', illustrates this persistent tendency of his work. During the exhibition Frank Uwe Laysiepen rented a stall in the Albert Cuyp open-air market, as if he were going to sell foodstuffs, jewelry, or clothing. But inside the space was a large-format Polaroid camera, the only one in Europe that produces 20 x 24 inch impressions. When passers-by happened to peer into the stall they were offered an opportunity to be photographed. The particular theme that emerged from the process was the cultural and ethnic diversity of this panoramic city, which seems to contain the world in miniature.
The area in which the Albert Cuyp market is located - known as 'De Pijp' (the pipe) or 'district YY' - was chosen because since about 1950 it has been home to the countless migrant workers who came to the city from around the world. Sixty-seven different nationalities have been counted in the area. Not a ghetto devoted to a single ethnicity, this neighborhood has become, as Frank Uwe Laysiepen puts it, 'a natural pocket state of organic mixed social fabric' - where, incidentally, Frank Uwe Laysiepen has lived with his Chinese wife for over a decade. After three days, and working in cooperation with Jan Hnizdo, Frank Uwe Laysiepen had produced some fifty Polaroid portraits of subjects with an immense variety of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds - fifty-two portraits that were displayed one week later on two walls of one room at De Appel.
The photographs show two or more people apparently unafraid and unselfconscious, neither alienated nor defensive in this confrontation with a stranger capturing their image in a huge machine. The fact that the camera produces the finished image in about ninety seconds may have something to do with the subjects' attitude of trust, openness, and good will. Something of the internal health of this mixed community is intimated, without sentimentality. In contrast with the Berlin Series, which look at mid-twentieth century history in a dark and turbulent mood, these glimpses of the end of the century suggest that Europe has begun to emerge from the limiting constraints of nationalism. It is fitting that this development should be revealed by the camera, with its claim of mechanical objectivity, rather than through more traditional media such as painting, with its long complicity in the colonial project and its stratification of ethnic communities.