Emergency in the Netherlands

By Jeroen Hofman in Galleries — 09 Jan 2012

In Jeroen Hofman’s new monograph Playground, the training facilities for Holland’s soldiers, firefighters, rescue workers, and police officers are photographed from a cherry-picker, turning dangerous scenarios into LEGO sets.

Interview by Rosecrans Baldwin

TMN: How did you come to be in these locations in the first place?

Jeroen Hofman: It all started when I was at the Maasvlakte (an area near the harbor of Rotterdam) looking for a location for a series of photographs. Completely by accident I found myself driving through a post-apocalyptic landscape: blackened industrial complexes, a concrete building, scattered burned-out vehicles, all surrounded by refineries and heavy petrochemical industry. Only when I got closer, I realized something wasn’t right. There was nobody living in the building. This ghost town turned out to be a training ground where Shell and BP’s offshore crews prepare for possible industrial fires. Continue reading ↓

Crailo—N-Holland, Aug. 25, 2010. Practicing an area-evacuation simulation as part of Advanced Riot Police Training.

Royal Dutch Army No.10 Oostdorp Harskamp—Gelderland, Feb. 10, 2011. C company of the 13th Infantry of the Air Cavalry Brigade during Urban Operations Training. The smoke provides cover for their movement.

Police Academy No.7, Police Academy Lelystad—Flevoland, Oct. 2, 2009. The Police Academy gives (advanced) driving instruction to police personnel, the Royal Family’s security service, and to others who need to be skilled drivers professionally.

FireFly Schiphol—N-Holland, March 26, 2010. Training Center for aviation. The Schiphol fire department fighting an fire caused by leaking fuel with two fire engines. The airplane is a very realistic copy of a Boeing 747.

Training Center North No.1, Wijster—Drenthe, Feb. 13, 2010. The Wolvega fire department practicing a “Train Incident Scenario,” a collision between the train and another vehicle combined with a fire in the rear section of the train.

Royal Dutch Army No. 5. The 17th Armored Infantry Battalion in action during training exercise Urban Operations Training in preparation for deployment to Uruzgan.

Marine Corps No.3, Pistol range Ossenweg Harskamp—Gelderland, Aug. 27, 2009. Training for new members of the Special Assistance Unit. They are in the Enhanced Marksmanship Program. These are among the finest marksmen in the Netherlands. It is strictly forbidden to recognizably photograph them.

Police Academy No.1 Ossendrecht—N-Brabant, May 25, 2009. The Riot Police during individual training. By using proper climbing techniques the Riot Police learn how to move inconspicuously, tactically, and safely.

Royal Dutch Army No.11, Oefen en Springterrein, Schaik—Gelderland, March 24, 2010—The Royal Army practices localizing IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) to make the road safe. This facility is part of the Training Unit Pontonniers. Here members of the Corps of Engineers learn about mines, explosives, booby traps, camouflage, and psychological warfare.

Interview continued

TMN: The scenarios you found are serious, but in the pictures they’re detached, as if we’re watching children play with toys. Did you notice this early on? Was it part of your attraction?

Jeroen Hofman: The training grounds in my project are also secret worlds—with one essential difference. These are safe enclosed playgrounds. Training here is play, theater in a hidden world. “For real,” but not really—not yet, and hopefully never. These areas are often huge in scale. The largest one in our country is Marnehuizen. It’s a complete military training town: houses, a bank, a supermarket, town hall, train station. It even has a sewer system. Everything there is fully functional. If you have ever played with LEGO you will immediately notice the similarity.

TMN: Can you imagine doing a book where the emergencies were actually taking place?

Jeroen Hofman: In these facilities it’s all just play: stage-acting on a few enclosed square meters. If you make a mistake, you get to try again. Wrong decisions do not have fatal consequences. But what I call “Playground” will someday become reality for the people in these photographs. For some this will happen sooner than they think. The Marine Corps trained at Marnehuizen for their mission in Uruzgan. They were the last group that shipped out before the mission was terminated. At the edge of the training ground they’d built a small compound surrounded by a wall like the ones you find all over Afghanistan. It was the marines’ job to go looking for explosives and narcotics. Two months after I made the photograph, they were sent to Uruzgan. A few of those marines lost their lives there.That’s the dividing line where “Playground ends” and reality begins—the deadly seriousness that follows, the real world, I would not like to be standing over that in a cherry-picker.

TMN: What are you working on now?

Jeroen Hofman: The launch of my book Playground was on Nov. 3. Self-publishing is a lot of work. It is like climbing a mountain, and after the summit you have to go back down—that is what I am doing right now. Self-publishing is self-distributing and self-promoting, and that is an awful lot of work.

So I am working on a lot of assigned jobs now to pay back the printers of my book. I have always loved a mix of commissioned and non-commissioned work. For now I am orientating myself to find a good representative in the UK and USA.