Photography | ORANGE CITY, IA
“In the process of meeting people and hearing their stories, I have been adopted by an Orange City family who keep me real and honest and who feed my imagination with questions and possibilities.” – Rene Clement
Babies in northwest Iowa’s proudly Dutch town of Orange City aren’t actually born with clogs on their feet. The high school cheerleaders don’t show up to games in long woolen skirts and embroidered aprons. And so far, at least, windmill tattoos aren’t terribly popular. But you wouldn’t know it from the photos in an unusual project by René Clement, a Dutch immigrant who lives in New York. He stumbled into Orange City almost by accident in 2004, made 10 trips back in the years since and now hopes to publish a photo book called “Promising Land,” funded in part by online donations from the website
www.kickstarter.com.
“You have a fantasy, and then reality eclipses your fantasy almost,” he said. “That’s why you do a project like this: It just makes you really happy.”
It all started with a trip to Nemaha, just south of Storm Lake, where a Dutch newspaper had assigned him to photograph the town’s famous square-dancing tractors (whose eight male drivers - four in overalls, four in dresses - performed their final do-si-do in 2008). He had an extra day in Iowa before his flight home, so the farmer he was staying with offered to show him around Orange City.
“It was like a ghost town,” Clement recalled of his Sunday morning tour. “People were either at home or church, so it was completely deserted.”
The town was founded in 1870 by Dutch settlers from Pella, and the photographer marveled at its windmills, its buildings with traditional arches and stair-step facades, even its Dutch-style Pizza Hut, where he stopped for lunch.
“He thought it was uber-Dutch or even Disney Dutch. He thought it was more Dutch than Holland,” said Doug Burg, a local photographer whose family hosted Clement during each of his return trips. The visitor headed home to New York, freshly reminded that it, too, was founded by Dutch settlers. He returned to Brooklyn (named after the Dutch town Breuckelen), where he lives on Bushwick Avenue (from the Dutch “boswijk,” meaning “forest neighborhood”), not so far from Coney Island (originally “konijneneiland,” or “island of the rabbits”).
But the clues about New York’s former life as New Amsterdam aren’t as obvious as the ones in northwest Iowa.
“There is no Dutch parade along Fifth Avenue, nor is there a Dutch neighborhood in one of the boroughs,” Clement explains on his website,
www.reneclement.com. “We tend to take our cultural heritage largely for granted.”
He started thinking about how cultural heritage shapes community identity, and he hatched a plan: He would return to Orange City for the annual Tulip Festival and photograph locals in traditional costumes, in the style of the old Dutch masters (Think of Vermeer’s 17th Century “Girl With a Pearl Earring”: soft lighting, dark background, telling details).
He met Gail Van Grouw, for example, at the festival in 2007.
“I had just purchased a bratwurst. I was walking home with it in my hand, and he asked me if he could ‘make’ my picture,” she said, adding that she might not have agreed if he hadn’t seemed so friendly. “The Dutch accent helped.”
Clement ushered the “Girl With a Bratwurst” into his makeshift studio, just off the parade route, and captured a shot of her laughing in her traditional lace shawl and bonnet. She bought a copy of the portrait later, framed it and now hangs it up each year during the festival.
The other portraits are similar. Each subject is dressed in full Dutch regalia, often with just a single clue from modern times - a pair of sunglasses, a cell phone, a handful of nachos.
From there Clement started to imagine the locals wearing their costumes in different settings, as if they were actors in a movie. On subsequent trips, he recruited people for elaborately staged shots inspired by Hollywood or his own imagination. In one image, the Dutch St. Nick, known as Sinterklaas, flies over the horizon on a snowmobile. In another, a couple in traditional costumes and jack-o’-lantern masks stands in a cornfield, each with a shotgun in hand.
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