de Hood

a publication from 'a future museum of the present'

Emerging out of a series of walks along the Voorstraat, the street on which the ‘Future Museum’ is sited, ‘de Hood’ becomes at its most basic level a documentation of various shop fronts, displaying the particularities and diversities of the commercial and cultural landscape of a shopping street in Dordrecht during the summer of 2010. However, in each shot we are aware through the reflected image within the shop front, both of the urban/commercial landscape on the opposite side of the street, and the figure of the photographer caught in the act of capturing the image currently being viewed. Through this device we are reminded that far from being a neutral ‘document’ we are witnessing a subjective and framed construction capturing the point of view of the figure in the frame. As this figure is, through the operation of deep rooted societal presumptions around race and gender, a member of a group more often fixed as the subject of photographic surveillance, and whose act of looking and recording (in the post 9/11 age of racial paranoia)  is capable of engendering a sense of potential threat, a whole set of contested boundaries are crossed.

The only text appearing in the book is the title, which exists as a play on colloquialism and language. The definitive article ‘de’, which exists both as the Dutch word and the ‘Ebonic’ slang for the same word, is seen prefixing the term ‘Hood’, a colloquial derivation of the term ‘Neighbourhood’, more often associated with ‘black’ urban spaces The term also exists in English as a shortened form of the term ‘hoodlum’, suggestive of threat and criminality, a character ‘up to no good’. What is attempted here therefore is the interlacing of a number of different messaging systems, which begin engage in a commentary on documentation, language and societal perception.