Exhibition Modern Madonna’s

This month the exhibition Modern Madonna’s by  photographer Annette Bleeker can be seen in the Passage of De Hallen Amsterdam. For Annette photographs are a way to express reality and current events, to create order in the chaos of reality.

Annette worked for many years as a photojournalist for various newspapers and magazines. Nowadays she focuses on autonomous photography where she is looking for worlds behind reality and she also takes pictures of people in a special setting. With her series she shows ten Modern Madonna’s, women from Amsterdam, breastfeeding their child. An image that unfortunately disappears more and more from public space.

“The first safe place is with the mother, the basis for secure attachment. If it is missing, it becomes, to put it mildly, difficult to hold your own in this world. Breastfeeding is one of the ways to emphasize the bond between mother and child. In this hectic time, mothers often lack the peace, time and space to do so without being able to do anything about it. For the women I photographed, feeding was a sacred and transcendent moment, where they were placed outside of time.”

Images remain silent, interpretation she leaves to the viewer. “Images may or may not pass through your eyes to your soul, that transparent elusive object that leads us along paths that we do not want but must go.” Annette has several exhibitions to her name including ‘Vrouwen in den Vreemde’ and ‘Bolivia’.