I’ve mentioned Verve, a web site set up by photographer and photo editor Geoffrey Hiller to feature new documentary “photographs and interviews by the finest contemporary image makers today” several times before, and it’s a site where I often find interesting work, too often to write about it every time. It’s a site I’d recommend you to bookmark and browse through from time to time, or add to your RSS feeds.
As I do. And yesterday I came across some work from a Dutch photographer I met a few years ago in Poland, Alex Ten Napel. I started to write about his work at the time, impressed by his water portraits, but somehow that piece never got published (I think I may have been waiting for permission to use some of his pictures and then simply forgot about it.) The work on Verve is from his black and white series of portraits of people with Alzheimers that he made in the 1990s, and there are more on his web site along with several other projects.
Other people have written about him and published articles in various countries. On his web site you can find a PDF with magazine pages with his pictures and text in (I think) English, Dutch, French, Italian, Greek, Russian and Polish.