Selling Polaroids in the Bars of Amsterdam, 1980
In 1980 Dutch artist Bettie Ringma and her American counterpart Marc H. Miller spent a short period taking Polaroid photos of the more seedy side of Amsterdam’s nightlife. The result has just been published in a new book, which displays the hairstyles, the clothes and even the bad teeth in all their glory.
The neon dance clubs of New Wave were not for them. Instead they haunted the cafes of the Rembrandtplein and the Zeedijk, which at the time was a no-go area for many.
“Certain places were more receptive than others and we were doing it for the money,” says Miller. “The people we photographed are the people who wanted to be photographed. In a way it is an accidental collection of people.”
The more the drink flowed, the more likely the bar or its clientele were likely to pay the princely sum of six guilders for a posed picture. “Every time we saw our regular clients they wanted new pictures,” Miller told Dutch News in an interview.
Ringma and Miller picked up the idea in New York and brought it to Amsterdam where they moved as a couple in 1979. In 1980 they approached Amsterdam gallery Art Something about a possible exhibition and asked Polaroid for some form of sponsorship. The company even gave them a stock of film so they could make double photos – one for the bar and one for their own collection.
A second exhibition took place in 2018 at the Galerie Stigter Van Doesburg shortly before Ringsma’s death. As a result, the collection was acquired by the city archives and has now been turned into a book.
The book is a time capsule showing a small part of Amsterdam at a specific time. 1980 was the year of the squatters’ riots and the inauguration of queen Beatrix, of high unemployment and heroin, but there is little evidence of these trends in the Polaroid photographs.
Instead you will find Herman Brood with rotten teeth posing with Stien, her eyelids thick with baby blue eyeshadow in Bar Festival or regulars at De Zon disrobing for the camera.
One short series features members of the Ajax football team celebrating a win. Others offer a fascinating glimpse of the city’s newer arrivals, the gastarbeiders from Turkey in the Cascade restaurant on the Geldersekade and the Surinamese workers and musicians at Jazzland on the Korte Leidsedwarstraat.
Two essays, – in both English and Dutch and wrapped around the photos, put the collection into perspective as an art project and make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the city’s past.
Memories
“But above all, there are the photos themselves, which do not care about all those memories and later interpretations,” writes Leonor Faber-Jonker in her introduction. “The Polaroids were made following the instructions of the people portrayed and could not exist without all those people who could be found in the Amsterdam bars in 1980.
“It is they who commissioned Bettie and Marc to take a photo, posed as they felt like, and thus shaped the collection – ultimately determining what is in this book forty years later and how we will remember that time.”
“For me personally it was probably a great romantic moment of my life,” says Miller. “We lived on a houseboat opposite the Anne Frank house… four or five times a week we would go out and hit the bars. It was our walk on the wild side here. It was an adventure.”
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