Jan Banning is a Dutch autonomous artist/photographer, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He was born in Almelo (Netherlands) on May 4, 1954, from Dutch East Indies parents, and he studied social and economic history at the Radbout University of Nijmegen. Both of these facts have had a strong influence on his photographic works.
His origin is expressed in the choice of subjects, such as Indonesian women who were forced to become prostitutes for the Japanese army during the Second World War in ‘Comfort Women’; or former forced labourers in South East Asia during the same period in ‘Traces of War: Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways’; also the repatriation of elderly Moluccans from the Netherlands to the Indonesian Moluccas in ‘Pulang: Back to Maluku’.
Study of history His study can be seen in the historical components of his subject matters. His academic education is expressed in his aim to achieve sound intellectual foundations for his self-initiated projects on the basis of a thorough preliminary investigation. De Volkskrant reviewer Merel Bem wrote: ‘Each subject that Banning approaches (…), the photographer dives right in with the passion of a scientist’; and ‘This investigative approach might be an explanation for the fact that the form is a direct, concentrated and controlled result from the content’ (in De Volkskrant 8-5-2010, review of ‘Comfort Women’).
This academic basis can also be seen in his often conceptual approach and his regular use of the typological method (visual research in which he looks for variations within a tightly repeated form). Jean Dykstra wrote (in Art on Paper, Sept/Oct. 2008): ‘Borrowed from the methodology of science, it allows for differences to emerge within a category of similar things.’
Social focus Banning’s work always has a social focus. The social political environment is put at the fore and it often concerns subjects that have been neglected within the arts and are difficult to portray: state power, consequences of war, justice and injustice. Sometimes the work is the result of a sociological or anthropological classifying approach, such as ‘Bureaucratics’, a comparative study of the world of government officials. Other times he focuses more on the psychological aspects; on the divergent influence that major social events have on individuals (‘Comfort Women’, ‘Traces of War’, ‘Down and Out in the South’).
His projects usually have a personal point of departure, but are never ‘private’: he places the subjects that stem from his private life in a larger social context. To give an example: the history of Banning’s father and grandfather who were forced to do hard labour during the war is not only limited to something biographical related to those two family members, but instead it is broadened into a research into the long-term influence of abuse and humiliation on European and Asian labour slaves (‘Traces of War’).
