Paulien Oltheten. Photos from Japan and my Archive

Paulien Oltheten (b. 1982) travels the globe with her camera, casually but precisely capturing photos and video footage of people who are hanging around and tagging along. Walk on a Line is a compilation of photos and film stills that were recently shot in Japan in combination with images, short texts and sketches from her extensive archive. Through her novel handling of the medium, within the tradition of documentary street photography, Oltheten occupies a prominent position in Dutch contemporary photography and art. Walk on a Line is a book about ideas, about lines, folds and wrinkles, about interstitiary spaces and traces. Whether everyday or absurd, real or stage-managed, the images are above all terribly infectious. Oltheten’s work has been acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam. She recently won the Thieme Art Award and has been nominated for the de Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize 2010. Oltheten observes, manipulates and moulds, and she does that so infectiously that you will inevitably start looking at the world through Oltheten spectacles, and that is an enrichment. – Hans den Hartog Jager, NRC Handelsblad