Theo Baart captures old landscapes, new cities

By Myra Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): Photography has many uses, but one of the most exciting use is as a record of history. Sometimes a moment is captured that becomes history when the photographer hits the button, such as the birth of a baby, a car accident, or a bombing. Photography can also annoy people, like the paparazzi who stalk celebrities. The madness that follows these celebrities can not be entirely blamed on the photographers, the public is also responsible, for it is because of their obsession with sensationalist stories that these pictures are taken.

Like many good photographers, Theo Baart, whose series of pictures is on display at Erasmus Huis in South Jakarta, has a more noble mission to spread to the world.

Growing up in the Dutch region of Haarlemmermeerpolder, Theo noticed the changes the area was undergoing. His once peaceful town was becoming part of an expanding city. He observed that even the small provincial Schipol airport was expanded to become an international airport.

He recorded the changes that have taken place in the last 20 years or so as many old buildings disappeared and were replaced by new ones. He saw and recorded on film the impact this had on the habitat and the culture of the area and even on the behavior of the people who lived there.

Being a native of Hoofddorp, the town that had become the center of this development, Theo knew all the people and, he said, almost every stone and every grain of sand in the polder. He went on to photograph the old farmhouses and the trees, the landscape and the people, his old classmates and farming families and their cattle.

He also photographed the interiors of the houses and the changes that could be seen there, due to changes in style and taste, but also to the development of new technologies. The kachel, the coal stove in the center of the living room which the family gathered around every winter evening, has now disappeared to make way for central heating in all rooms. This may have caused a different lifestyle and family relations. The groceries and butcher shops have now been replaced by huge supermarkets without the personal treatment from shopkeepers.

One of the photographs, seemingly uninteresting, shows a couple standing beside a sign with "50" on it. This couple was celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. Another one is of four boys standing on a farm plot, once in their possession, but about to be bulldozed to make way for a housing project.

The windswept road, which Theo had to take to go to school on his bicycle, has been transformed into a highway. The old tax office is now a shopping center.

What bothers Theo Baart most is probably the development of recreation centers for the inhabitants. It is not clear to him, he explains, why authorities think it necessary that woodlands be transformed into gyms and golf courses. He giggles when he shows the dirty canal where he learned to swim and describes the town's new modern swimming pool.

His involvement in his work is so deep that he has studied the history of the development and knows a lot about further plans for the area. He has his own plans to develop a kind of game similar to Monopoly about his subject. For this, he says, he will divide the area into different categories and establish their market value.

Changes like this are happening everywhere in the world, but the Haarlemmermeerpolder is lucky to have an former inhabitant like Theo Baart recording its history co closely. Not many places have their changes recorded in such beautiful pictures as Theo has published his a book in the Netherlands. Most cities have to be content with lesser pictures and less details. The stories behind these changes, which are so important to the development of an area, may also remain untold in most of the cases.

Theo Baart has made the photographs with a large dose of love, an ingredient that cannot be neglected by those who want to express themselves in one form of art or another. Like a great storyteller, he told the audience at the opening of the exhibition about his experiences, which only an insider who grew up together with these changes could tell.

The exhibition will be shown in Erasmus Huis for one month until June 10.