A Dutch Photographer Reimagines the Story of His Life

Sander Coers realized about his grandfather’s demise in a Facebook put up in the course of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. His grandfather’s spouse posted an image from the Bali Post of his corpse being faraway from their house in a physique bag. Helpfully, she tagged her husband within the image. “It’s the way Indonesian people use Facebook,” Coers advised me not too long ago, “which is a cultural difference from anything we would do in Europe or in the US.”

Coers, a photographer primarily based in Rotterdam, doesn’t know why his grandfather’s passing made the papers. His grandfather died of a coronary heart assault, not of the lethal new illness that was then ripping throughout the globe. “He was just a regular guy,” Coers advised me. But Coers suspects that his demise brought on alarm as a result of he was technically a foreigner. His grandfather had lived most of his life within the Netherlands, after he and his mom fled the Indonesian National Revolution that erupted within the wake of World War II. He had returned to Indonesia in 2015.

Coers’s grandfather nearly by no means talked about his childhood. Born to a Dutch colonial soldier and an Indonesian mom, he was interned together with his mom in a focus camp by the Japanese, who despatched his father to Burma, the place he died of an sickness whereas engaged on the notorious “death railway,” a 258-mile prepare route between Thailand and Burma, the development of which resulted within the deaths of 90,000 Southeast Asian civilians and 12,000 Allied prisoners of warfare. Later, he was persecuted by his Indonesian countrymen as they tried to purge the islands of any hint of colonial occupation, together with combined youngsters. After his grandfather’s demise, Coers’s household found an in depth archive of images and paperwork that he had compiled: items of a household historical past shattered by warfare and upheaval. His return to Indonesia had been part of a quest to search out the ghosts of his previous. 

When his grandfather died, Coers was ending his grasp’s diploma in images at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, the place he was engaged on a challenge, Come Home, that handled problems with masculinity, self-discovery, and reminiscence. Another challenge, Blue Mood (Al Mar) (2021–22), with comparable considerations, adopted shortly after his commencement. Dreamy and solar drenched, these photos are precociously confident and emotionally resonant, recalling the environment of Éric Rohmer’s summer time idylls. Coers defined that the work sprang from a reckoning with the nostalgic pull of his provincial hometown of Terneuzen, which he grew up longing to flee. By returning house and trying to seize one thing akin to the recollections of his youth, he sought to revisit and reimagine the story of his life.  

Coers started a brand new pair of initiatives within the wake of his grandfather’s passing, POST (2023–24) and Eulogy (2024–ongoing), during which he expanded the ambit of his fascination with the slippery nature of reminiscence and id to embody his household’s historical past in addition to his personal. In POST, Coers fed photographs from outdated household albums into an AI mannequin, which then spit fragmentary facsimiles of a previous that by no means existed: a dark-skinned man frolicking in a area of flowers; a white boy splashing via the surf; the slope of a person’s go well with jacket shoulder. Coers’s curiosity in masculinity, which anchored his earlier work, is broadened right here to incorporate the query of cultural heritability. 

“The way I view AI is that it’s sort of a collective memory of humankind,” Coers advised me. But he’s conscious that AI constructs our collective reminiscence surprisingly. It produces photos which might be extra archetype than archive, assemblages of our collective fantasies about ourselves. Underscoring the constructed nature of those AI photos, and, by extension, the cobbled collectively high quality of each masculinity and reminiscence, Coers UV printed the photographs from this challenge on plywood, including additional materials and metaphoric dimensions to his work.    

For Eulogy, an ongoing challenge he started in 2024, Coers delved deeper into his grandfather’s previous, and the legacies of colonialism and battle that formed it. As in POST, he continued to work with each AI-generated photos and archival supplies, however he additionally journeyed to Indonesia to make photos of his personal. The ensuing works, a few of that are printed on hand-glazed tile in addition to plywood, present gauzy, evocative glimpses of a previous each idealized and vague. It is a time that Coers is aware of solely via photos, that his grandfather sought first to overlook, after which, maybe, redeem via remembrance. 

Coers is constant his grandfather’s last challenge, however he’s doing so with the information that it’s a futile one. Looking at these works, I’m reminded of a passage in a letter written by the fictional protagonist of Chris Marker’s nice cinematic disquisition on reminiscence, San Soleil. “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,” Marker writes via his character, “which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”

Read extra from our sequence “Introducing,” which highlights thrilling new voices in images.