Le Cru et le Cuit

In this picture, Bert does what he did as a child: sitting at the table in his pajamas with his dad. But now that he has become an adult, it gives a somewhat strange feeling… Bert has built up a whole series of his own in this way. Of photos in which he does what he did in his youth.

Bert and his parents are actually always the subject of the photos. For the series The End of History, Sissingh takes carefully thought-out photos of typical Dutch scenes. The photos show a typical post-war family. The photos are not gloomy, there is always a bit of humor in them.

‘I was at art school and my teachers were absolutely not satisfied with my work. They said that I made things that looked like art but weren’t. Then at a certain point I thought, I’m going to go to my parents. Then I’ll take a photo of myself. Then it at least doesn’t look like art. Maybe my teachers would like it then. And indeed, they liked it. I continued with it and also graduated,’ says Bert.

In 1999, Bert’s mother passed away. He took a photo about that. Bert is standing with his father at his mother’s grave. After her death, his photos always had a certain kind of emptiness.

A LAM visitor already recognized the photographed containers. A meal service for the elderly. It is incredibly popular in the Netherlands and Belgium: hot meals delivered to the home, especially for the elderly. Seniors are often less mobile. Even leaving the house to do the shopping, and even cooking can be quite difficult. Great solution, those meal boxes!

Eating together is connecting. Discussing the day. Just asking: how are you? But, what is Bert eating in this photo?

The title of this work of art refers to a book by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It means roughly: the raw and the cooked. The book is about contrasts such as scarcity and abundance and fresh and rotten. How do you see that reflected in this work?

Bert uses the titles of the photos as a means to direct the viewer in a certain direction. Various themes are about growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, the conflict between the pre- and post-war generations and growing up in a certain class of society.

Bert Sissingh (1956) studied autonomous art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Before that, he had been an amateur photographer for many years. He lives and works in Rotterdam. His works are included in several museum and other large collections in the Netherlands.