Nude Animal Cigar

Nude Animal Cigar takes its title from a Paul Kooiker installation at the Fotomuseum Den Haag, which interspersed images of nudes and animals with close-ups of cigars he had smoked in his studio.

Kooiker made the installation at the museum's invitation, looking back over a career of about twenty years, and it showed some two hundred photographic works from October 2014 to January 2015. Art Paper Editions of Brussels published the book in 2015 as a 336-page hardback measuring 17 by 24 cm.

Kooiker was born in 1964 and studied at the School of Photography in The Hague and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He won the Prix de Rome in 1996 and the A. Roland Holst Prize in 2009. He does not aim for the perfect single photograph. His work is made afterwards, through selecting and manipulating a large body of exploratory pictures into fictive collections, which he presents as installations and as photobooks. The museum notes that he has issued artist books since 1999, mostly with the publisher Willem van Zoetendaal.