Iris Sikking about “Starring Chas Gerretsen:”

For Chas, photography was a means of looking into situations from the outside. It allowed him to enter, observe and participate in a variety of worlds, then move on again. His episodic career is perhaps best summed up as a life lived as a series of separate scenes. The link between them is Chas himself, which is why I have given him the starring role in the exhibition and the associated book. Not to place him on a pedestal, but to give him the recognition that his photography so richly deserves.

The exhibition enables us to look back and reflect on events of the past. To appreciate the value of being on the spot and capturing history as it is made. The surprising and unexpected episodes that I came across in the course of my journey in Chas’s footsteps seem to me precisely the strength and beauty of his life and his photography. This exhibition and publication will take the audiences and readers to the battlefields of Vietnam, the streets of Santiago de Chile, the set of Apocalypse Now, and the stages of Hollywood film stars. These four separate chapters in Chas’s work and life seem at first sight to have little connection with each other. But together they constitute the extraordinary foundations of Chas’s photographic oeuvre and life.