Omstreken

The ways in which people try to keep their bearings in changing situations is a recurrent theme in Cock’s work. What is striking about this is his often nimble, humorous approach. Certainly when he turns his camera on the ups and downs of (and in) the urbanizing landscape, his visual language is extremely recognizable. In both black and white and color he has an almost poetic eye for the small things in life.

In ‘Environs’ Cock presents a selection from over twenty-five years of his work, concentrating on the photographs that he has made in the North of The Netherlands. Some of the photographs have been previously published, but at least as often they are pictures that have surfaced from his archive – to the surprise of their maker. They are photos that he had forgotten about, or that, in retrospect, turn out to show more than they revealed at first glance.Collectively they offer an overview of Cock’s development as a photographer, and, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground, they also reflect something of the changes that have taken place in Dutch society over the course of time.