Nagele [Revisited]
The village of Nagele in the Noordoostpolder (N.O.P.) is a striking example of postwar planning in the Netherlands: a brand new village on reclaimed land. It was one of 10 newly build villages but the only one designed by young modernistic architects like Aldo van Eyck, Gerrit Rietveld and the landscape architect Mien Ruys. One of its distinguished features was that all houses had flat roofs. All villages were intended for a largely agricultural population and the land was divided into identical plots situated along the straight lines the new roads cut through the landscape. The first inhabitants of Nagele were meticulously selected by inspectors which would travel all provinces of the Netherlands on motorbike checking if the applicants were hardworking, decent and strong, trying to compose a population which would be representative of the inhabitants of the Netherlands as a whole.
30 years after the village was founded Theo Baart and I photographed Nagele, its residents and the landscape over a years period resulting in the book Nagele N.O.P. (with a text by Anneke Van Veen, Fragment Publishers, 1988).
20 years later, invited by the village 0f Nagele itself, we went back to photograph during its fiftieth anniversary resulting in a second publication, Nagele [revisited] (with a text by Warna Oosterbaan, Ideas on Paper/ NAi publishers, 2006).
In this second publication we combined images we scanned out of family albums by the pioneers made in the first years of the new village with the two series of photographs we took in 1987/1988 (b&w) and in 2005/2006 (colour). Both books were designed by Hans van der Kooi, 8-13 Grafisch ontwerpers
