It’s not so inconceivable that a painting or sculpture would take years to complete, accumulating layers of meaning as the artist played with contour or color. But a photograph? Dutch husband-and-wife duo Sylvie Zijlmans and Hewald Jongenelis spent nearly four years on Ten to One, a large-scale photograph on view now at Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Shooting 4×5 negatives, the couple took a photograph each afternoon for ten days of a meticulously art-directed celebration held in a field in the Dutch countryside just outside Amsterdam. They combined the ten photographs to create a final image that gives the illusion of a sprawling afternoon affair — what the exhibition catalog writer Dirk van Weelden calls “a marvelous multiplication of festivities.”
Zijlmans and Jongenelis used only ten models for the shoot, with each model appearing ten times in ten different outfits. The models were friends of theirs — fashion designers, artists, filmmakers, an art historian, a teacher from their children’s school — most of whom had worked with the couple before. “Sylvie and I have been working together on commissions since 1993, and we always try to involve as many people as possible, to the point where producing the sculpture or whatever was an excuse for a gathering,” says Jongenelis.
But Ten to One soon became about much more. To make each outfit, the artists called on the services of 100 different Chinese tailors, traveling back and forth to Beijing over the course of a year, sourcing the fabrics, visiting and revisiting the tailors, dealing with import restrictions from the EU. “Working on Ten to One became like working on a painting,” says Jongenelis. “Everything was given the same amount of attention regardless of whether it would be visible in the final photo. Someone half-hiding behind a tree in the back got as much attention as someone in the foreground. When we were in China, it was like we were buying final parts of the image, not clothes.”
A magazine accompanying the exhibition, which is available here, catalogs the entire process. Of the couple’s strict documentary procedures, Van Weelden writes: “The facade of each tailor’s shop was photographed, followed by his or her workshop, what was made, and a large portrait of him or her. Then the labels that were sewn into all the garments and the receipts when the business was concluded. All the fuss and bother, the misunderstandings, the embarrassing situations and the unfinished jackets — all that was left out of the picture. They are a series of uniform images. Without explanation, interpretation, or drama.”
Zijlmans and Jongenelis photographed ten subjects (plus tables, port-a-pottys, and three potted conifers) ten times for ten consecutive afternoons during a hot summer month in 2006, each day moving the action closer to the horizon. “When we started the project, we didn’t expect such heavy shadows,” says Jongenelis. “To get the same light in each picture, we made a simple sundial. When the shadow hit one rock, we started, and when it hit another, we stopped.”
The couple used Lego maquettes to style the photo long before the outfits had been chosen or the location scouted. They meticulously photographed and analyzed each set-up, and in doing so discovered the need for a visual break down the center of the image. “It was meant to be a stream, but we never found one. In the final image, it looks like there’s a road, but it was actually us driving out to the scaffold and back to create tracks.”
Zijlmans and Jongenelis went back and forth to China several times, carrying with them a book to document each aspect of the project. On the left is a sketch with the model’s measurements, and on the right is an archive of materials, tagged with a number assigned to each of the ten tailors.
“Keeping track of the colors and textures gave us an idea of how color would work in the field,” says Jongenelis. “We wanted brighter colors in the background and greenish hues in the foreground.”
The color blue, for instance, was banned, so as not to conflict with the sky.
When they began the project, Zijlmans and Jongenelis simply phoned friends in China and asked them to locate 100 tailors in the area. “If you would try to do this in Holland, it would be impossible,” says Jongenelis. “But to be a tailor in Beijing, you don’t need to invest a lot. You don’t need material — people bring their own fabric — you just need skill.” The couple ended up using the services of around 110 tailors, as some of the commissions came back sloppy.
“This guy worked in a very poor industrial area. He had organized his studio in a professional way, and yet everything in it was totally improvised or handmade. On the right you can see an iron with a cord that goes to the ceiling, a makeshift little construction with the water and pipes.”
“Sylvie and I visited this couple late at night, and we had our kids with us. The little boy spoke a bit of English and was incredibly excited because they never see foreigners. It was very sweet: He gave our kids a Chinese reading book from his school, and our kids gave him a Tintin comic book they had bought in Beijing.”
“The guy in the very back is the tailor. It was this surreal experience because he works in a market where they sell meat. When you enter, you think you’re in a butchery, but in the center, there’s this tailor working.”
“This tailor lived in a peaceful area with lots of old people. There were a few tailors in a row who all produced the clothes for that area. I think there were five when we first went, but only one remained last time we were there. People aren’t buying their clothes from tailors these days, they’re buying them at stores, and this type of tailor is quickly disappearing in Beijing.”
In the exhibition catalog, Van Weelden writes: “In the poorer districts, such as Mentougou, the tailors often ignored the measurements they were given. They preferred to work to the shape of a slightly roomier imaginary suit. Cutting the fabric is a risky operation, because if the cut is too skimpy, the tailor has to pay for the wasted fabric; if it is an expensive cloth this can ruin him. The interpreter contemptuously referred to such people as ‘unbrave tailors.’”
“A typical image of what these areas look like, with this Russian-style architecture,” Jongenelis explains. “This was a big market where you could get everything you could ever need, from furniture to roasted duck feet, and there were some tailors inside.”
A catalog of receipts
“No one we visited was ever on street level, and many of the tailors worked in areas where there weren’t visual landmarks. We took a photo of each entrance to document the project but also to show the cab driver!”
For the final shoot location, the couple settled on Broek in Waterland, located six miles north of Amsterdam. “We spent a lot of time talking to farmers in the area because we wanted a certain kind of grass,” says Jongenelis.
Over the ten days, “Sylvie would stand next to the camera on a scaffold, holding a megaphone,” says Jongenelis. “It was sort of a party where now and then someone yells at you to do this or do that.”
“There was a girl who had to take a pee, and she asked, ‘Why is the toilet so far away?’ She didn’t realize it was part of the set!”
It started with a dead hamster. In the late ’90s, Dutch photographer Danielle Van Ark was living in Rotterdam, reacquainting herself with the charms of the grain-eating, wheel-chasing starter pet. Her hamster expired right around the time the Beastie Boys were coming out with a single called "Intergalactic". “The cover of that single was basically a giant hamster attacking humanity, and it inspired me to have my hamster stuffed,” Van Ark says. “I found someone in a village near Rotterdam who does it, and I loved the place instantly.”
