Generations

In other recent series, Ruud van Empel has become well known for his explorations of childhood and innocence, placing uncanny youngsters in a variety of Edenic settings. In the new series entitled Generation, he has followed these children to school, as it were, in two large panoramas presenting ... Read more

In other recent series, Ruud van Empel has become well known for his explorations of childhood and innocence, placing uncanny youngsters in a variety of Edenic settings. In the new series entitled Generation, he has followed these children to school, as it were, in two large panoramas presenting them in the format of the class photo, lined up in ascending rows against a simple backdrop. As has been his working practice for some time, van Empel constructs these images as a collage of dozens of individual digital photographs, stitched together in Photoshop, a process that enables him to create very large finished images, while maintaining high resolution. This process also enables the
artist to have much greater control over all the individual elements of the picture, from selection of the individual expressions on the children’s faces to the play of vivid colors across the carefully coordinated ‘picture day’ school clothing each of them wears.