Anne Geene’s curiosity about the world of plants, animals and things is unbridled. She photographs, notes, and collects. She studies and documents her material, looking for patterns and phenomena, she retrieves information and images from the relevant literature, and publishes the results in photographic works and in book form. What her camera registers forms the basis of her work. That approach is akin to scientific research, but she’s not a scientist. Visual similarities, patterns and contrasts are the only basis for her conclusions about underlying processes. Just like the fictional Dr Paul Bogaers that she introduces in one of her books, a priori she excludes nothing that is conceivable based on visual information alone. The results are stunning, surprising and hilarious. They will never appear in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, so she publishes them herself. Pure visual art!
Anne Geene studied Art and Cultural Studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and photography at the Royal Academy by of Fine Arts in The Hague and the St. Joost Academy in Breda, and earned a Master of Arts in Photographic Studies at the University of Leiden. She received the ING New Talent Photography Award 2014, a honourable mention at the Van Bommel Van Dam prize in 2013, and the Harry Pennings Audience Award 2012. Her work is present in the collections of the NederlandsFotomuseum, Rotterdam, Museum Van Bommel Van Dam, Venlo, the ING art collection and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture & Science.
This year, together with Arjan de Nooy, she published Ornithology, which may be seen both as a photographer's study of birds and as an ornithologist's excursion into photography.