Amsterdam

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Photography

Humor and Happenstance Coalesce in Julie Hrudová’s Amsterdam Street Photography

Along the streets and canals of Amsterdam, photographer Julie Hrudová (previously) captures daily life through candid snapshots of cyclists hauling unique cargo, pedestrians battling the elements, and canines commuting in style. In her series Chasing Amsterdam, Hrudová focuses on everyday moments and unexpected happenings around the Dutch capital, highlighting the diverse routines of its inhabitants. She has also just begun to experiment with mobile phone videography. “After roaming the streets of Amsterdam, it’s fun to capture the city and other places in a new way,” she says.

Prints from Chasing Amsterdam are available to purchase in Hrudová’s shop. Find more of her work on her website, or follow updates on Instagram.

 

Photography

Herons of Amsterdam: A Photo Series Reveals the Unusually Large Population Living in the Dutch Capital

Spending timing in any major city is likely to bring run-ins with urban wildlife like rodents and pigeons, but in Amsterdam, there’s one long-legged species stalking the streets in unusually large numbers. In her ongoing series Herons of Amsterdam, photographer Julie Hrudová documents the thriving feathered population—it’s grown considerably in recent decades, and in 2017, officials estimated there were 800 pairs living in 25 neighborhoods—swooping down to sidewalks for a meal and confidently strutting into people’s homes.

Often nesting in park trees, the now-ubiquitous birds are known to scour fish markets at close to scavenge the day’s unsold product and visit the zoo at feeding time. They’ve integrated themselves so wholly into the lives of the city’s human inhabitants that it’s not uncommon for residents to supply food and respite to the striped creatures. “They have names for them, like Kiri the heron, who comes by every day for a snack and is not scared to enter the house,” the Prague-born photographer says. “At times he stays for a while and watches TV.”

Last year, Hrudová released a zine compiling many of the images shown here, and she’s currently working on a new book titled Chasing Amsterdam that will be filled with the street photos she takes on a weekly basis. You can follow her sightings around the Dutch capital on Instagram, and check out her curated account StreetRepeat for a survey of the recurring themes photographers document around the world. (via Jeroen Apers)

 

Photography

Take an Eerie Walk Through the Empty Streets of Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York City

With one-third of the world’s population currently under some level of quarantine, the streets of major cities like Amsterdam, New York City, and San Francisco are an unusual and unsettling sight. Film director and cinematographer Jean Counet, who shot “Meanwhile in Amsterdam,” shows the capital city almost entirely deserted. Public transit is empty and a four-minute walk reveals less than a dozen passersby.

Counet tells Colossal that “Meanwhile in Amsterdam” came together like any other film, except that “this time there was no director, and no plan,” he says. “We walked through the old city centre of Amsterdam between 8:30 (and) 13:30 which is normally teemed by walking people and bicycles. What we witnessed felt like a dream. Sometimes beautiful and mesmerizing, sometimes scary and worrying.”

In a similarly bizarre look at San Francisco, stop lights cycle from green to red with no cars passing through and businesses are boarded up. One with a psychedelic facade even has signs that read “We will survive” and “We will get by,” a hopeful gesture derived from the city’s musical legends that directly contrasts the nailed plywood covering the windows.

To see how the global pandemic is affecting public life in New York City and Rotterdam, check out the videos below. (via Kottke)

Art

8th Annual Light Festival Illuminates Amsterdam with Glowing Sculptural Installations

This year’s Amsterdam Light Festival, running November 28, 2019, to January 19, 2020, lights up the European city with illuminated art installations. The festival, now in its eighth year, attracts tourists and engages locals at a time when the city is cloaked in darkness for about sixteen hours each day. Visitors to the Light Festival use a phone app to guide themselves through Amsterdam’s city center, perusing twenty light works by artists from around the world. This year’s show theme was “DISRUPT!” and artists reflected the concept in pieces that ruminate on climate change, national history, technology, and more. See some of our favorites here, by Masamichi Shimada, UxU Studio,  Sergey Kim and others. You can explore the full line-up and programming on the Amsterdam Light Festival website.

Art

Amsterdam’s 2018 Light Festival Illuminates City Streets with 29 Art Installations

This past month the Amsterdam Light Festival (previously) opened its seven year, inviting visitors to observe 29 light-based works by international artists, designers, and architects along the canals and throughout the historical center of the city. Artworks were inspired by this year’s theme, a quote from media scientist Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.”

Installations such as British artist Gali May Lucas’s piece “Absorbed by Light” address our contemporary obsession with screen-based technologies. Her piece features three figures next to each other on a bench, each head bent to peer at an illuminated phone. Guests can take a seat between the sculptures to get a better look at the piece, or simply rest and check their own device. Another piece, “Waiting” by Frank Foole features a paused loading wheel on the side of the building surrounding the silhouette of a person inside.

Many of the works are presented close to the city’s canals, making an even more spectacular scene when reflected in the water below. Sculptures like Jeroen Henneman’s “Two Lamps” pay tribute to this effect as the title references the lamp installed on the riverfront, and the one that is projected into the glassy surface underneath. The Amsterdam Light Festival continues to light up the city through January 20, 2019. You can see more documentation of this year’s festival on their website. (via Design Boom)

 

History

Dig into an Incredible Compendium of Objects Excavated from the Bottom of Amsterdam’s Amstel River

During a nine year period in the early 2000’s a new metro line was excavated along the banks of Amsterdam’s Amstel river. The urban waterway had to be completely pumped, which gave archeologists a rare opportunity to examine the full spectrum of everyday and extraordinary objects which had fallen to the bottom of the prominent river. Below the Surface, a website created by the Department of Archaeology; Monuments and Archaeology (MenA), the City of Amsterdam; and their Chief Technology Officer, serves as an interactive compendium with access to images and information of 19,000 of the nearly 700,000 findings from the excavation site.

On the website you can explore the findings by date or dig into Below the Surface’s selection of object stories which provide context to specific pieces pulled from the river. An historical background is provided for select buttons, tokens, pottery segments, stamps, books, and other findings such as a 19th-century pipe cover decorated by a portrait of the Dutch navel lieutenant Jan Carel Josephus van Speijk or a 16th-century belt which bears the inscription: “Ik bin en ieger nu ik hebbe dat mi behaget” (or “I am a hunter and I now have what delights me”).

Meticulously divided display cases of the found objects are installed in the new metro line’s Rokin Station and can be visited by the public. A short documentary of the project can be found on Below the Surface’s website, with English subtitles coming soon. (via Kottke)