Rutger ten Broeke – In Hindsight

'Rutger ten Broeke - In Hindsight' is a retrospective exhibition of the work of Dutch photographer Rutger ten Broeke. Ten Broeke turned eighty in early 2024: the perfect occasion for a tribute. The exhibition shows a multifaceted oeuvre spanning almost 60 years. A small portion is in the collection of Photography Museum Hilversum.

Three female curators show Ten Broeke's photography from their perspective and in a new context. 'Rutger ten Broeke - In Hindsight' is a journey through space and time: a photographic exploration of personal stories and unknown worlds.

With the exhibition, Photography Museum Hilversum, through renewed observation and composition, creates space to explore the relationship between man and his surroundings, to evoke new associations. Ten Broeke repeatedly puts that relationship at the center. He emphatically frames man and the environment inside and outside the image. This can be seen in his portraits, urban and village landscapes, abstract and natural forms in miniature, and landscapes in which the presence of man is decisive.

10,000 Portraits
The exhibition includes well-known works combined with work never before shown. Thus, for the first time, the series 10,000 Portraits will be exhibited in a museum context. Ten Broeke set up his studio in many cities where he portrayed passersby. Thus we see carnival celebrations in Dunkirk, visitors to Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and passersby at Amtrack Station in Chicago. With equal attention, he captured a garishly dressed reveler, an ordinary mail carrier, or a well-known politician.

Relationship between man and nature
Ten Broeke's photographs of a man in vast and remote nature are best known. The naked figures contemplate and experience the landscape. With his images, the photographer searches for the moment when the body and landscape become one. What results is a variety of beautiful vast landscapes, or utopian images. Ten Broeke continues to search for the relationship between man and nature with his cinematic photography.

'Rutger ten Broeke - In Hindsight' additionally shows photographic experimentation with form and nature. Around his home in Baarlo, Ten Broeke has been photographing for years. Here he develops his Sequences and Vegetable strategies.

Changing landscape of photography
As a photographer, Rutger ten Broeke found himself amid a changing photographic landscape with contemporaries such as Bertien van Manen and Ed van der Elsken. Documentary photography was becoming increasingly popular, while so-called staged photography also attracted the interest of many Dutch photographers in the 1980s. Ten Broeke followed his course, both at the beginning of his career as a fashion photographer for Viva, among others, and later with his autonomous work.