Sanne Sannes - Darkness & Light 30 October 2009 until 9 December 2009

Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam presents Darkness & Light, a special retrospective of the photographic oeuvre by Sanne Sannes (1937-1967). In the relatively short period of time that Sannes worked as a photographer, he managed to build up a unique portfolio. His obsession with the erotic force of the female was overpowering. Women formed his favourite subject and were an endless source of inspiration to him. Sannes photographed women over and over again in ecstatic sessions, during which he portrayed them often in the nude and at their most intimate. This intimacy is emphasized by the out-of-focus and underexposed pictures, because Sannes worked with existing light and photographed with a hand-held camera.

With his grainy erotic portraits, his relentless urge to experiment, and his non-conformist attitude Sannes came to be seen as the most promising photographer in The Netherlands during the Sixties. He worked on exhibitions both in the Netherlands and abroad. Due to his untimely death, he never truly achieved an international breakthrough - he died in a car accident at the age of thirty.
Even though his career was not a long one, the oeuvre Sannes built up was of the highest quality. The exhibition at Foam shows a cross-section of this work and contains unique vintage prints, large format prints especially made by Sannes for exhibitions, projections and parts of the mock-up of Sannes’ never-published photo book Dagboek van een erotomaan [Diary of a Erotomaniac].