23 april 2025, Wouter van den Eijkel
Birds of Paradise or the vanishing of the ‘social’ in social media
Since 2011, Sander Dekker has been photographing eccentrics around the world, not to portray them as ‘different’, but to highlight their authenticity and give them a platform. He finds them on social media. In 2011, when he first started The Social Media Project, that was still easy, but over time, the spontaneity and social aspect of social media have faded. “What I captured is fairly unique and was only possible during that specific time. Now it's harder to find people and ten years from now may be impossible.”
Over the past four years, Dekker has worked on The Zine Project, a series of ten handmade booklets in limited editions, each dedicated to one eccentric or theme. One of the zines, TenFifteen, is presented as a black-and-white installation featuring 1,600 photographs.
The exhibition 'Birds of Paradise' in TORCH Gallery offers an overview of The Zine Project, with each zine displayed on its own ‘island’ in the gallery.
Birds of Paradise, TORCH Gallery
A cramped Paris apartment
At the entrance of the gallery hangs a picture of a woman wearing nothing but a thong and long latex gloves with large white lilies sticking out of them. Her hair partially covers her eyes, but her posture and facial expression speak volumes: she’s grinning broadly and clearly enjoying herself.
To the left, we see through the window a burgundy steel balcony railing. In the distance, an apartment block and a building with a metal roof. Behind her, a messy double bed you can barely walk around. This must be a cramped apartment in the centre of Paris. We are in her home.
“Nudity is often equated with sexuality, but that’s not my goal,” says Sander Dekker (NL, 1980) at the gallery. “Daring to expose yourself, literally and figuratively, is the ultimate form of freedom.” Nudes make up less than half of Dekker’s work but dominate the visual narrative. “I’m really interested in the eccentricity and authenticity of these people.” Often, they found Dekker’s work online and undressed of their own accord – a kind of self-reinforcing effect.
Birds of Paradise, TORCH Gallery
Birds of paradise
Dekker has been photographing ‘birds of paradise’ he finds online since 2011 – people who are shamelessly themselves. If someone caught his interest, he’d save them in a folder and once he had 50 to 100 candidates, he’d plan a trip to that city.
The result is a cosmopolitan snapshot of mostly young urbanites in places associated with a lively nightlife: New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Amsterdam. “People often think I lead a party life, but in real life, I’m kind of a letdown,” Dekker says with a grin. He describes himself as an introvert who automatically says no to social invitations. “That’s probably why it worked so well — because if you put two eccentrics in one room, that’s one too many.”
Birds of Paradise, TORCH Gallery
Spontaneous encounters
Once at his destination, he’d first walk through the home to get a sense of the resident through their belongings – “that breaks the ice.” Then he’d set up his camera and shoot for about two hours. “It has to be a spontaneous encounter. I don’t do prep work because that makes me start filling things in—and I don’t want that. I also don’t direct the subjects. They just do whatever they feel like doing.”
Over the years, that approach has become more difficult. People are more guarded, accounts are more often private and messages are answered less frequently. “That was also one of the reasons I stopped The Social Media Project,” says Dekker.
Zines
Four years ago, Dekker decided to flip the format and focus intensively on one eccentric person or theme at a time. The pace slowed dramatically: “For some zines, I rented a holiday home for four days where I met with the main subject and made the zines entirely myself.” Eccentrics still took centre stage, but the themes now also touched on the negative experiences that such radical self-expression can evoke.
Dekker photographed the half-naked woman with the lilies in 2022 for what would become Girls in Paris. “Not long before that, I was asked to make a feminist calendar in Paris. There, I was told that domestic violence against women is quite prevalent. So, I decided to contact the most sexually liberated people I could find online, photograph them and interview them about the darker sides of their freedom. For this exhibition, I wanted to include quotes from those interviews on fabric panels. You have to read through the darkness to see the freedom they allow themselves.”
Dekker also created a zine about Asian Dutch people and the ingrained discrimination they experience, and one about the LGBTQ+ community in Warsaw, which under the previous government faced ‘LGBT-free zones’. “I’m a huge advocate of freedom and being able to express yourself, so these were important topics to address.”
Birds of Paradise, TORCH Gallery
The zines became more elaborate — later editions even included interviews — and thus more labour-intensive to produce. The 'Birds of Paradise exhibition' is laid out in ‘islands’, one for each zine. There’s also a wall with 1,600 10x15 cm photos from the TenFifteen project, which includes many images from The Social Media Project. “That wall isn’t about the individual photos, but represents what social media has become: a bombardment of images. Just blind entertainment through videos. The personal and social aspects are gone.”
Zeitgeist
In retrospect, you might say I captured a zeitgeist, a time when you could connect with someone on the other side of the world online. That was only possible during that era. Now it’s harder to find people and ten years from now, it may be impossible. What I captured is fairly unique. My endgame is to get a call in 20 years for exhibitions about social media at a time when anything was still possible.
'Birds of Paradise' featuring work by Sander Dekker can be seen at Torch Gallery in Amsterdam until 17 May 2025.
