GerardPetrusFieret

Gerard Petrus Fieret (1924–2009) was a Dutch photographer who trained as a stained-glass maker before turning, in the 1960s and 1970s, to a free-spirited, unmistakably direct style of portrait photography that made him one of the most singular figures in postwar Dutch photography. Working mainly in and around The Hague, he photographed nude models, pigeons, and self-portraits with an obsessive, restless energy.

Fieret’s relationship to his own prints was as radical as his imagery: rather than protecting his negatives and photographs, he stamped, signed and dated them repeatedly, sometimes to the point of near-illegibility, and allowed creases, mold and decay to accumulate on the surfaces. This idiosyncratic handling has since become inseparable from the reception of his work, each print standing as a unique, damaged object rather than a repeatable edition.

Fieret struggled for much of his life with mental illness and lived in increasing isolation, sharing his cluttered apartment in The Hague with numerous cats and pigeons. Despite — or because of — this precarious existence, his photographs found increasing recognition from the 1990s onward, championed internationally by figures including the New York gallerist Deborah Bell.

A major retrospective at the Fotomuseum Den Haag in 2004 and his inclusion in the group exhibition Modern Times at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam in 2015 established Fieret as an important, if long-overlooked, voice in twentieth-century photography. He died in The Hague in 2009.