Featured Street Photo by Peter Kool

Featured Street Photo by Peter Kool

Peter Kool is one of my all time favourite contemporary street photographers. His style is surreal and he pays great attention to detail. What I like about his photographs is that you need to ‘decode’ them to get them. Some are easier to understand than others and can be analysed in split seconds, but others take a little bit more time and those are the ones that I enjoy look at the most.

Peter was born on the 30th January in 1953 in the Netherlands. Since 1973 he has been living in Belgium where he still resides today. He studied photography at the Academy of Fine Arts at Sint-Niklaas Belgium from 1980 to 1985. Even though he studied photography he didn’t dedicate his life to it until a few years ago, but since then he hasn’t lost focus.

Peter Kool is a member of the iN-PUBLiC Street Photography collective, the first ever street photography collective. In the past we have featured other members of iN-PUBLiC such as Matt Stuart, Blake Andrews, Maciej Dakowicz, Mark Powell, Narelle Autio and Trent Parke. You should surely visit his bio page on In-Public and give it a read.

You can see more of Peter Kool’s photography on her Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/peter-kool/ or if you prefer his Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/kool_peter/ and also on his website at https://www.peterkool.be/.

Untitled

I love this photograph. I will describe it and try and understand it however odd it looks. God only knows what these people are doing. At least in the part of the world I am from, I haven’t seen anything similar before. Is this a game, is it random, is it suppose to mean something? The 3 people at the bottom of the photo are each within a circle doing one thing or another. The 2 people at the top of the photo are not in circles, however you could say that their two circles are unoccupied temporarily, since there are 2 empty circles in the top right. Geometry in this photo is apparent, not only in the clear circles that can be seen, but on the positions of the people and the lines that are made in the ground from the footprints. I see triangles between circular shapes and people, I see connecting lines and I get a sense of harmony throughout the composition. It feels as if they are practicing some sort of choreography and Peter Kool is their assigned photographer, immortalising their moves. Looking at it gives me a sense of balance and symmetry, even if it isn’t perfectly symmetrical or balanced. A wonderful photo from a contemporary master. Great job Peter!

About this weekly feature,

As you know, every so often we feature a photograph of a Street Photographer on our website. The Street Photographer that is featured is selected by the Street Hunters team.

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