Paul Kooiker’s “encyclopaedia of life” in 164 images. This ambitious but utopian project reads like a sampler of photographic genres: landscape, nude, still life, etc. To achieve this, Kooiker often uses clichés more reminiscent of the propaganda of tourist brochures or of religious and political rhetoric in the media.

Kooiker increasingly allows the personal to creep into the work. Intimate private photographs break through the seemingly objective approach so that public and private space spill over in.