James H Soul

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James H. Soul (1970) doesn’t like talking about his life; it makes him feel uncomfortable and he eludes questions on the subject by cracking the odd joke or making some remark that is probably true. Born to a Dutch mother and an unknown father, James travelled a lot during his childhood together with his siblings and parents. Rumour has it or at least I’ve been lead to believe that his father was the drummer of a famous band back in the 1970s. His younger sister lives in Porto Seguro, Brasil; he doesn’t deny it and adds with a resentful gaze that they were abandoned by their parents in Pretoria, South Africa, while his father’s band was on tour in that country. James, Carmen and Haché, his younger brother, found themselves alone in a luxury hotel, with their parents missing after a night of heavy drinking and taking drugs. After spending a week living in the hotel, their Aunt took them into her house in Amsterdam where they spent most of their teenage years. That was where James started experimenting and developing his artistic skills, mixing photography and painting from the very beginning. However, a fire that broke out in his Aunt’s flat destroyed most of his initial works. Only a few of them, which he keeps in a safe p...

Life, life, life...

PRIVATE WORKS: "LIFE ON THE WALL"
In order to do this “visual biography,” James always requests that the candidates should be at least 40 or 50 years old to ensure that they have lived a long life that is full of “substance” and experiences: material so to speak which he will capture and then reflect on a portrait. The process is very similar to the one applied to the portraits we have discussed before but in this case, James spends more time with the client to seek and select the customer’s most appropriate personal photos for the final work. The photos that are chosen for the final collage must be representative of the client’s life and it is he himself (the customer) who has to tell James why such photos are important, what was going on when they were taken, when was that, etc. Once the process of selecting the photos and texts that go with them is over, the photographic session takes place in the client’s house and James then goes to the lab and his studio to work on the layout and design of all the chosen material, sticking and writing by hand the photos and texts on the enlarged photograph of the client. The process takes longer than in the case of the portrait and since the work isn’t final, the clients are given the option...