For almost a quarter of a century, Hans Eijkelboom has been walking the shopping streets of countless cities around the world (Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Athens and Kassel) to photographically record the dizzying sartorial diversity that characterizes global capitalism, a plethora of visual differences ("superficial") that, seen from the perspective of an artist interested in distinguishing patterns, i.e. repetitions, inevitably results in a document of surprising uniformity.

Some of Eijkelboom's photographic projects of the mid-seventies, such as the well-titled Identiteiten (Identities, 1973), foreshadowed two defining traits of the street photography for which he is best known and which has preoccupied him since the early nineteen-nineties: on the one hand, his programmatic predilection for working in series (a question of form) and, on the other hand, his almost exclusive attention to the dress code (a question of content).

1992-20?

Hans Eijkelboom (Arnhem, 1949) is a member of a generation of Dutch artists who played a key role in the establishment of conceptual photography in continental Europe. Instead of focusing on the material execution of a work of art, the artists of this movement emphasized the importance of the concept and the idea. They rejected the more traditional view of art, which is based on the object itself. By extension, some artists also questioned the notion of high and low art.

Photography was an important medium in this evolution. Snapshots made their entrance into the art world, allowing artists to devote minimal attention to the actual material production of the work. Hans Eijkelboom was greatly influenced by conceptual art. He made his debut in the famous 1971 Sonsbeek exhibition, which included works by conceptual artists such as Carl Andre, Robert Smithson and Ed Ruscha.

Eijkelboom himself was often the subject of his early works. For With My Family (1973), he asked mothers with two children to sit with him on the sofa for a photograph. The result is a series of "family snapshots," each of which looks authentic, but which, when viewed as a whole, raise questions about the ease with which a father can be replaced in a family.

For the Beautiful series (1979), Eijkelboom explored the prejudices of the unknown about the others. He asked a random passerby to point out a "beautiful" person on the street. Then he made a portrait of the person in question and asked him to do the same. The series ends when the subject of the photograph can't find anyone he considers beautiful.

A large part of Eijkelboom's work has been published in photography books. His best-known books are In de Krant ("In the diary", 1978), which consists of photos of diaries in which Eijkelboom can be seen in the background, 10-Euro Outfits (2010), with thirty self-portraits in clothes that cost at most 10 euros, and People of the 21st Century (2014), a collection of his Photo Notes taken in five hundred different cities. The original works reproduced in these books can be seen at the Hague Museum of Photography.

Eijkelboom's work has also been exhibited at Documenta14. Until July 16, the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Athens exhibited his work The Street & Modern Life. This series of portraits of shoppers and other works will be shown in Kassel.