PORTFOLIO - JURGEN ONLAND
The Puzzle of Existence
by Oscar Meo
Jurgen Onland is a Dutch photographer, no longer young, who has achieved renown in recent years, thanks above all to first prizes awarded at the Urban Photo Races of Amsterdam (2017), London (2018) and Paris (2019), to which several other minor awards have since been added. As he himself stated on Lensculture¹ on the occasion of the publication of the portfolio In between worlds — presented here, and the result of work carried out between 2021 and 2023 — his approach, which he specifies is self-taught, is documentary and autobiographical in nature: his "self-reflection" is meant to serve not only as an instrument of "personal growth", but also as a way of "stimulating" and "provoking" the observer, so as to encourage him to reflect on his own life, with "its imperfections and its beauties".
A clear and simple programmatic manifesto, which however — in its terseness — does not do full justice to the path Onland follows to realize it, or to the poetics underlying it.
His work certainly belongs to the tradition of the quête, so rich in photography, as it still is in the art in which it was born, literature: a journey in search of one's own past, in contact with the atmospheres of which it preserves mnemonic traces; but — in his specific case — also the empty search for what could have been and never was, that is, for what — according to a famous statement by Aristotle — distinguishes poetry from history: the art of the possible (even if unrealized), which "speaks the universal", from the recounting of facts, which "speaks the particular". This is what happens with Onland and the longed-for brother he never had, who appears half-length both in a photo from In between worlds sufficiently blurred to make him a ghostly presence, and in a sharp, faceless close-up from a portfolio still under construction: I call him Vincent². Not, then, a reproduction of the real as it is, but of a real steeped in imagination and interwoven with a certain nostalgic regret: an invitation to reflect on the theme of being what one is not. Moreover, Onland's work shows an interesting stylistic variety: in the portfolio Walk in silence, which portrays the streets of Manchester and other English towns — birthplace of the musicians he loved as a teenager — the constant reference to his own past is combined, as he himself acknowledges, with the agile (and therefore immediate) way a street photographer engages with reality.
The true protagonist of Onland's photos, even the most realistic ones with their glossy staged photography quality, is thus not the direct and precise memory of real events, but an oblique, allusive reconstruction of the past. His subjects may equally be "normal" things and individuals portrayed in "normal" settings, or strange masked figures — "alien", so to speak, and vaguely unsettling; a pink "Texan-style" hat resting on a meadow (or perhaps, why not?, magically landed there); a young footballer in an utterly serious champion's pose; an interior deserted of human life that recalls the golden age of Dutch painting; or — in a long-shot photo — a man caught kneeling, almost in an attitude of adoration, in a totally incongruous setting; and so on. One wonders, though: do these photos narrate something, with the observer left only the task of connecting the images and filling in their "gaps" (or blanks) to reconstruct a story?
The question is far more complex. The indirect relationship of the photos to Onland's past life and the absence of an ordered, coherent narration suggest we consider his work a symbolic reconstruction of memory: lived events, objects, figures (no matter whether real or imaginary) that held a fundamental significance pass once again before his eyes, but transfigured, and the photographic image becomes a present trace of what is irremediably absent. But this is precisely the traditional definition of the symbol: a real object that is never identical to its ideal referent, yet recalls it — allusively, indirectly.
What, at this point, is the observer to do — apparently placed by the author in the worst possible position, that of having to reconstruct the puzzle of someone else's existence, whose pieces he inevitably cannot fit together, because he does not have before him the complete image he needs as a guide to finish the work? Some will say the question is meaningless, because the observer does not know, and cannot know, what the author knows. Well, this is precisely why Onland can affirm that one of the intentions of his non-narration is to induce the viewer to reflect on himself, in a sort of Augustinian "return into yourself", since "truth dwells in the inner man". The photos thus present themselves as an invitation, or an appeal by hints (that is, through an "indirect language"), to the recipient: to fill the empty spaces with reference to himself, to trace from scattered clues a personal itinerary of his own — one that might even lead him to attempt to recompose his own existential puzzle, to seek the meaning of his own life. The result is a wager, not a certainty: the establishment of a communication from existence to existence.