INTERVIEW: Office life boring and stuffy? Nick Hannes sees poetry in it
Boring and stuffy. That’s the association you probably have with office life. Photographer Nick Hannes thinks otherwise. In fact: he sees poetry in it. For his exhibition The Financial Zone he disappeared behind the large and imposing office walls of the financial business community in the Netherlands and Belgium and – with special cards and keys – passed door after door to capture office life for us, the outsider.
‘You would think that finance is not very rich in images’. With this sentence Boudewijn de Bruin, professor of Financial Ethics at the University of Groningen, will open The Financial Zone at Kunstpunt Groningen on April 30. ‘If you Google “bank” or “finance”, for example, you’ll mostly get to see computer screens. Spreadsheets, graphs or office buildings. And people in office clothes, clothes that you also see in Nick’s photographs. Yet it won’t escape your notice that Nick’s images are about different things.’
And that’s clear. Many of the photos look homey, full of greenery, custom lighting and sports areas. The focus is on greenery and meeting. Interesting to see, Hannes thinks. ‘You might think, what’s special about this? But an office building like this is actually a capsule, a separated world. Sometimes it felt like I was walking through a small city. In a very complex microcosm, which you can only discover further if someone can open the various security gates for you.’
That deeper layer, hidden behind gray walls, is also what appeals to de Bruin in Hannes’ work. ‘Often you only notice what’s there when you look a little longer. A photo with people in the rain, near ABN Amro and Houthoff advocaten. It is raining hard, but judging by the clothes it looks like mid-summer. In the foreground two people who have prepared themselves well: with umbrella and raincoat. Slightly more in the background two men without and clearly soaked. But look further, a facade with rainbow colors, the only color between all the wet gray. Is the viewer being seduced into thinking about diversity in finance? Are these rainbow colors a bank’s obligatory statement on LGBTI policies?’
The viewer gets to say it, and that is characteristic of Hannes’ work. ‘The good viewer will no doubt be able to figure out my idea, but I think it’s important that everyone can get their own story out of my work.’ De Bruin notes that the world of banks and insurers does not initially look very similar to other work by Hannes, ‘but the closer you look, the more similarities you see.’ He points to the cubicles where employees call in, or where they can work or eat separately. ‘In Hannes’ earlier work we already saw people eating (Kyrgyzstan) and sleeping (the train in China) in cubicles.’
It is these ordinary situations that attract Hannes in the series The Financial Zone. ‘Office life is automatically associated with boring and stuffy, but if you have a little more eye for the banal, there can be poetry in it. Something doesn’t have to be spectacular or exotic. Sometimes you can see wonderful things in ordinary situations; you don’t always have to travel far to make a good sequence.’ De Bruin can only agree. As a university, we are delighted that Nick Hannes, in particular, wanted to immerse himself in the world of finance. With Nick we see things that we otherwise wouldn’t see, or wouldn’t see them as he sees them.
The Financial Zone can be visited until July 24th in Kunstpunt Groningen.
