In the project On My Doorstep, photographs range in technique from photogravures (toyobo) to handprinted silver gelatine and platinum-palladium prints. With these traditional 19th-century methods and a poetic approach to stillness and movement, Bol’s romantic aesthetics reveal through landscapes and scenes of nature. His work seeks, and finds, intimacy and tranquillity in the natural landscape of the Ooijpolder where the artist has been based for 30 years. On My Doorstep explores the notion of home and reveals the artist’s immediate surroundings. The title was inspired by the work of the American photographer Paul Strand, The World On My Doorstep (1994). His doorstep was literally the world at large. Bol’s doorstep – between 2020 and 2022 – was limited by necessity to a few kilometres around the artist’s house.
Hans Bol is recognised for his depiction of birds as messengers of eternity. The crow, one of Bol’s favourite species, is also a metaphor for something rather universal. Not only death, an interpretation that dates back to pagan times, but also an omen of happiness according to some cultures and mythologies. For White Crow, Bol uses platinum-palladium printing that results in warm-toned and slightly velvety prints. This technique, which stems from around 1870, is known for its long and subtle tonal scale which gives the prints a timeless quality. Making these prints is a true craft; when done properly, platinum-palladium prints can last for many hundreds of years.
In his series God’s Allies revisited, Hans Bol reinterprets and re-prints negatives from his archive. The original project was published as a booklet God’s Allies (2018, designed by Willem van Zoetendaal). In the revisited series, Bol exclusively makes small, intimate, silver gelatine prints. He searches for a different palette, a more gloomy tone and a more mysterious/mystifying interpretation of the raven. The prints are at times unpredictable and unpremeditated as Bol uses pre-exposure, toning and solarisation. In post-production, by adding a gold leaf or gold dust to certain prints, the more mysterious and perhaps even divine element that is so often attributed to these birds is intensified.