Review: NLXL, Made in Holland - Karel Tomeï
Saturday 11 November 2017, 22:44 by Erik van Rosmalen | 5,825 views | 0 commentsThis article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.
Karel Tomeï has been a leading figure in aerial photography in the Netherlands and far beyond for decades. With 'NLXL - Made in Holland', he proves it once again.
You could almost feel sorry for your postman's back if this book is delivered to your home. NLXL Made in Holland weighs almost four kilos. It has to, when you publish a hardcover book of four hundred large pages, with hundreds of photographs.
This is nothing new for Karel Tomeï. For years, he has published his photographic work in books of above-average size. This book, NLXL Made in Holland, is, for example, the successor to 'NLXL Nederland van Boven', originally published in 2008. A similarly substantial work has also been published about Belgium.
The Grote Bosatlas, which almost everyone knows from their school days, is also a sizeable book, and Tomeï has been supplying photographs for it for decades.
The Bosatlas has probably lost a lot of ground in recent years to solutions such as Google Maps. Is real aerial photography, as Tomeï presents it, losing some of its market share to drones?
We increasingly see photographers experimenting with them and creating beautiful things. And so we are becoming more and more accustomed to the bird's-eye view. Yet many drone photographs cannot match real aerial photography, shot from Karel Tomeï's helicopter with his regular pilot.
Golden Age
Wonderfully enough, the first image in the book is not a photograph, but a painting from the Golden Age, in which we look down on Amsterdam from above.
Like the rise of drone photography, it once again shows how much we like looking at ourselves from above. Former Rijksmuseum director Wim Pijbes wrote the foreword around that idea, accompanying the historical, but very realistic-looking, image.
The addition of NLXL initially confused me: is this a reprint of the first NLXL from 2008, of which we already discussed the reprint on Photofacts in 2012?
As then, these are beautiful images from the air. Beautiful because of their composition, lines or colour. Or beautiful because they are so alienating. The variety of images and landscapes remains, even in a new book with the 'same' formula.
In NLXL Made in Holland, Tomeï categorises his images even more, with sections covering landscape, land use, history and economics. Or the final section, Double Dutch, in which he shows the contrasts, both literal and figurative, of the Dutch landscape.
Are these chapters necessary? Not necessarily, but they do provide some structure in the enormous collection of images in the book. Each chapter is also introduced with a good amount of text.
Buy or not?
Do you already have one or more of his works on your bookshelf? Then you will undoubtedly think you recognise some of the images. But just as often, you will be surprised again.
Many photographers mainly follow a photographer in their own 'genre': portrait, street, architecture or nature photography. And the number of serious aerial photographers in the Netherlands is limited, unless you have ambitions with a drone.
I would advise photographers to look beyond their own boundaries for once: genres do not exist, because ultimately every photographer wants to tell a story. Karel Tomeï still does that exceptionally well.
About the author
Erik werkt als content specialist. Daarnaast is hij freelance tekstschrijver en fotograaf. Mensen vormen daarbij het hoofdonderwerp: portret- en reportage-fotografie. Volg Erik ook op Instagram!
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