In this book, published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition in the Hague Museum of Photography, the photographer Helena van der Kraan's oeuvre, spanning more than thirty-five years, is subdivided into three successive groups: early black & white photographs from the 1970s through the mid 1980s, then portraits from all periods, and finally colour photography which she began in the course of the 1990s. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1940 as Helena Jirina Maazel she emigrated to the Netherlands in the 1960s.
What immediately strikes one is that van der Kraan prefers to stay close to home; her work expresses no yearning for the distant and unknown, but rather for the familiar that through its visual obviousness would often seem to have nothing more to offer to the photographer. She has worked continually against all the prevailing fashions, and certainly against that of charming, trendy manipulated photography.