Heaven

Heaven is a photobook of 494 Polaroids by the Dutch artist Paul Kooiker, selected from an archive of instant pictures built up over twelve years.

Van Zoetendaal issued it in 2012 as a 176-page hardcover. According to the bookseller Plac’Art, the pages mix model studies with personal photographs from Kooiker’s private life and with landscapes, cityscapes, views of nature, fountains, churches and funerals. The same seller notes that the Polaroids were the starting point for several of his later projects, naming Model Studies (2001), Showground (2004) and Crush (2009) as direct results of those sessions.

Kooiker was born in Rotterdam in 1964 and studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He won the Prix de Rome in 1996 and the A. Roland Holst Prize in 2009. A gallery biography describes his method: he starts as a deliberately bad photographer, producing a mass of exploratory images, and then works on them after the fact.