His Portraits Got the Blues. The Photography of Koos Breukel

A good portrait operates in the field of contradiction, its rhetoric confirms and questions. It creates facts and rises upon them, registers and enchants. It does so in an intangible, simultaneous mix. Nevertheless for Koos Breukel a good portrait is no ambiguous secret. It is Breukel’s matter-of-factness which makes him a great photographer. He does not beautify, seeking instead, to judge by his photos, a sort of intensified, core reality, the beauty of veracity. He does all this clearly and with great precision.