On day three of Unseen Photo Fair, the Unseen Speakers' Corner continued with photographers Michael Wolf (1954) and Anouk Kruithof (1981). They were joined by Caroline von Courten at the MC Theater on the Westergasfabriek grounds, the site of Unseen 2012. With a special focus on the 'unseen' aspects of their work, the conversations revealed several interesting insights.

Michael Wolf
Michael Wolf worked in photojournalism from 1976 until 2001/2003 before turning to art photography. Van Courten asked Wolf about the series of work presented here at the fair by Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Tokyo Compression (2008). A return to photojournalism, if you will, as this series "looks into life and city, looks back to photojournalism. It is very direct and very up close." This series is quite different than his earlier work, Architecture of Density (2003), which is very abstract in form - "Architecture doesn't argue with you." Wolf, the son of two artists, developed a passion for collecting at a very young age, and stated, "Collecting is an obsession, I can't stop. For a photographer it's a constructive obsession." When asked about an 'unseen' aspect of his work, he mentioned the Transparent City series. "I found the photographs interesting, but I wondered if there was a way to enrich the book. When I zoomed into a photograph, I suddenly found a guy in the photograph that flipped me the bird! I knew I had something interesting. Up close, the images become very pixelated and abstract. Far away, they make sense." 

Anouk Kruithof
As a 2012 Recipient for Young Photographer from the International Center of Photography, Anouk Kruithof introduced herself with a short video about her work. Representative of her work ethic is her dissatisfaction with the medium of photography - "Over the last nine years, I have found it very necessary to understand the medium, and have often found it unsatisfying: the image in the frame. I have a love/hate relationship with photography. It is this inner struggle that I keep coming back to, and this struggle is very visible in my work." An example of this visible work is her installation, Wall of Fading Memory, presented here at Unseen Photo Fair by Boetzelaer|Nipsen. The installation includes 100 assemblages of cut outs to create a 'wall' of pieces and pieces of old photographs diagonally stretching from one side of the stand to the other. Like in her previous work, The Daily Exhaustion, she deconstructs and then reassembles visual information into a colour gradient. The work references the fading of analogue photography and the fading (and actual cutting up) of memories. 

For a full overview of the lectures and other festival items, visit the Programme page. More photographs from Unseen can be found on our Facebook page.