Paul Blanca (born 1958) is a Dutch art photographer. His official name is Paul Vlaswinkel. Blanca’s interest in photography was sparked after meeting Eva Veldhoen (1950), who was the daughter of the renowned painter [Aat Veldhoen] (1934). The artistic environment triggered Blanca’s creativity which he decided to express in photography. He began using a small screen camera, shooting in color but soon afterwards switched to black-and-white photos by the means of a Hasselblad camera (6x6 cm). From the 1980s onwards he started to get recognition for his work through his confrontational violent self portraits inspired by the works of Andres Serrano (1950) and most notably Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989).[1]
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Another big influence on Blanca’s work was the choreographer Hans van Manen (1932), a photographer himself as well and who owned a photo studio. Blanca even played a part in one of Van Manen’s choreographies, Pose, in which he enacted a kickboxer, a sport he had been practicing from when he was sixteen years old, surrounded by ten ballerina’s.
Mapplethorpe immediate showed a great interest in Blanca’s work and was Blanca’s entry into the New York high society of artists like Grace Jones, Jasper Johns, Willem De Kooning and Keith Haring. The relationship between the two author’s is most known through Mapplethorpe’s statement that “Paul Blanca is my only competitor.” Bill Katz, an art collector even states in True Colors – The Real Life of the Art World, by Anthony Haden, that “He reaches a kind of poetry few artists have.”
Recurrent themes in Blanca’s self-portraits are characterized by strong emotions and violence expressed through fear, aggression, pain, sadness and sexuality. Mapplethorne’s own personal favorite photo however, is a much more sensitive, nude shot called Mother and Son, in which passionately embraces his mother. Another example of his other side is Father and Son, a self-portrait on which he holds his newborn son.
Blanca is also known for his book Timing, published in 1986, which depicts upcoming Dutch artists of the 1980s, complemented by the poems of Koos Dalstra (1950). The theme of emotion comes out very literally in his series called Par la Pluie des Femmes, in which he captured women in tears by letting them think about their most traumatic experiences. Furthermore did Blanca work alongside fellow photographers Hans Gieles and Francis Boeske of gallyer Vous Etes Ici, with whom he produced the Sangre de Toro series in 1991, capturing bull fights in Spain. In the same time Blanca began to write as a research journalist and columnist for the Amsterdam Weekly, the Nieuwe Revu as well as the newspaper Het Parool on issues he came across in daily life as well as on the subject of the drugs crack which he started to use himself in order to write about, which resulted in an addiction.
His career took a turn for the worse, when an article he wrote for Nieuwe Revu was linked to the assault on Rob Scholte in 1995 because of the explored use of grenades debated in the article. The drama that unfolded over Blanca resulted in an addiction which he was able to shake off by buying a mountain bike which he drove to Spain and came back clean. After this, he made a comeback with a project called Mi Mattes, which shows a number of gangmembers hanging around his studio.
The theme of immortality holds a great of amount of interest to Blanca. The self portrait project With Eels shows a self-portrait in which Blanca is seen with six living eels in his mouth, looking at the viewer with an utterly resigned facial expression, like he truly believes that his is the way to reach immortality One of his more absurd, shocking projects is most probably the self-portrait called “Selfportrait, Back with Mickey Mouse,” which shows a crying Mickey Mouse with his thumbs up, actually carved in his back with a razorblade by a befriende tattoo artist. The Selfportrait Bull can be labeled as somewhat disturbing as well, as we see Blanca here painted in a bull-like manner complimented by an aggressive facial expression. To make the whole even more obscure he has his erected penis in his left hand and a “clenched grip” in his right. Blanca’s ideology behind this is to serve as a form of purification, subverting all boundaries and norms.