B U D S MARCEL VAN DER VLUGT
For Marcel van der Vlugt Senior (1923-2014)
One might say that flowers are in my genes, that they are buds, hidden for many generations. On the land what now is called De Keukenhof, Holland’s famous flower garden, my great-grandfather Celis started as a tenant farmer. He had to pay his rent to the baron of the castle on a weekly basis. My grandfather Willem van der Vlugt was born in the farmhouse there and became tulip grower in Sassenheim. As a kid I remember visiting him on Sundays as we wandered through his tulip fields behind the family house. My very first photograph as a four year-old kid is one of a flowerbed mosaic that was displayed along the flower parade route. As my father Marcel didn’t want to continue the hard work on the fields, he started working as a clerk with a flower export company instead. In order to avoid forced labour in WW2 he managed to move to the town of Naaldwijk in Westland, a region known for its flowers and vegetables. There he started as a photographer and became ‘world-famous’ in the region where he worked for flower growers, greenhouse constructors, flower auctions and their transport companies. But he also did weddings, groups, and portraits. For more than fifteen years he was the official photographer for the annual grape and flower parade and photographed the elected princess and the two maids of honour. And of course there were flowers everywhere, at home but also in the shop and studio where my father photographed the new flower variations often named after national celebrities. I started taking portraits of flowers in the summer of 1990. I think I received some Anthuriums as a present from my girlfriend and when these flowers had been sitting in a vase for a couple of weeks, normally one would have thrown them away. But these funny phallic flowers were drying up, morphing and discolouring and becoming more beautiful than ever. So one Sunday morning I set up my 8x10” camera, opened the large studio door and let the daylight fill the room and I began to portray the flowers on Polaroid film. Since then I would call it my Sunday morning therapy. But as I photographed more and more flowers, I became very intrigued by their colour, abstraction and symbolic meaning. And as the flowers changed with time from celebrating to mourning so did the photographs until there was no more film left.
Marcel van der Vlugt
B U D S