Shelf Sessions: Pieter Henket

Almost two weeks earlier, Pieter first told me about that fairy tale. In the comfort of his own home in Washington Heights, New York City, and alongside “his angel” Roger, he was a lot less nervous. He told me how that fairy tale started more than twenty years ago, when Pieter had just moved to New York. Now they’ve been together for nearly nineteen years, and occasionally work together as Roger is also a producer. “Just passport pictures,” he jokes, only to reveal later that he’s working on a new Ralph Lauren campaign.

It’s almost like the classic American Dream story which, indeed, may sound like a fairy tale. Pieter came to New York to follow a film course, and worked as a pizza delivery guy to pay his bills. Roger worked at TGI Friday’s, a casual American franchised grill restaurant, and that’s how they met. Now, Roger is also Pieter’s manager, and as the example above already showed, Roger is the one who saves Pieter on moments he needs it. “Roger, how did I start?”, Pieter asks. The manager replies: “You were interning at a production company when I met you, and then you became a model.” Pieter reacts: “Oh, that’s right!”

A lot has happened between being a failing high schooler in a rural area in the Netherlands to being an internationally renowned photographer. During our visit, Pieter recollects vivid memories from twenty years of New York. “I’ve seen so much crazy stuff,” he explains. ‘And it all kind of happened by accident. I was asked to be a model for L’Uomo Vogue, and I knew nothing about that. But as soon as I entered the studio and saw the photographer I was like: “man, I want to be that guy!’”

At a young age, Pieter was traveling the world as a model. It was his entryway to the world of photography. “Things went really quick from there,” Roger explains. “We had no idea what was going on. Pieter got offered to do an editorial for Esquire in Asia, and he literally had no idea what Esquire was.” Pieter explains: “We were in a club and I met this guy who worked for a magazine so I asked him if he thought my photos were good enough. I had all these naked pictures of Roger in which he was photoshopped to look like a lizard. Really weird stuff. The guy gave me his card and I sent him a link to the photos. He then called me at 4 in the morning and said: ‘Pieter, you’re insane!’ So I replied: ‘did you like them?’ Apparently, this guy was a famous editor for Esquire and Harper’s bazaar in Asia. He said: ‘You just sent me all these naked pictures of your boyfriend. You’re nuts! But I want to give you a chance. I’ll give you eight pages in Esquire. Do whatever you want.’”

That’s where Pieter’s career took off internationally, although the story was even more rocky than this: “The thing was,” he says while almost bursting out in laughter. “That photo I had given them was just a badly photoshopped low-resolution JPEG. Everything had to be decided really quick at that time, so they used that photo for the album cover and the promo material. I remember walking on Times Square and seeing my blurry photo on a gigantic billboard. Now, when I look back at it, I think it’s kind of cool.”

It’s safe to say that “Kind of cool” could be a summary of Pieter’s career in general. From offering his photography services on Craigslist for $50 per shoot, to being the personal photographer of early aughts R&B-icons like Ryan Leslie, Cassie, and Teairra Mari. As the conversation continues on his balcony, with a view over Harlem, Pieter namedrops all the artists he has photographed in his career. A list of names that resembles the iPod Mini playlist from yours truly during my early high school period. “That’s funny, because when I was a teenager, Nelly (the rapper) was my ultimate Victoria Secret Model,” Pieter says. “Nelly was the man of my dreams. When I moved to New York, all I could think of was that I wanted to meet someone who looked like Nelly. Hot In Here was my favorite song.”

Whether it’s that focus on finding Nelly, or a love for Hip Hop in general, Pieter made his way into the hiphop chronicle in the early 2000s. Surely, these times must have provided some juicy stories to tell. “Definitely!” Pieter says with a dry face. “This was such a weird time, musically. I remember Cassie telling us about her friend Rihanna, and everyone was like ‘who the fuck is Rihanna!?’”

Roger follows: “Pieter has shot covers for hip hop magazine The Source. He even did a shoot with Daddy Yankee, when Gasolina came out. Usher was probably the biggest artist back then, but he didn’t like us.” Pieter adds: “He was a huge dickhead!”

Pieter got introduced to most of these icons and dickheads through his friend Ryan Leslie, who was a major artist himself at that time and produced a lot of records for his peers. “Ryan Leslie just loved me somehow,” Pieter explains. “Maybe it was because I always took photos of Roger, so I knew how to photograph black men. We were very close friends, and he helped me a lot early in my career. At a certain moment he bought me like $20,000 worth of equipment to make photos of him. These were wild times. Everything was new and exciting. When you’re in your twenties, you think you’re really cool. Somehow I was much more confident about my photography at that time, than I am today. I think it was my favorite time in my career. We were the kings of New York. We were fucking pimping. I was walking around in clubs in the most dashing outfits imaginable. I even was wearing a $12,000 watch.” “That’s true,” Roger says, but we didn’t have any money for rent. The watches were sponsored.”

Even though Pieter certainly hasn’t lost his flamboyance (he’s wearing a red corduroy shirt, made from a velvet-like fabric during our visit), he seems to have moved back to Dutch sobriety. Or at least a little bit. Pieter takes us back to the moment he first received recognition from his home country. “I don’t think anyone in the Netherlands knew me at that time,” Pieter says. “Until Kees van Twist, the director of the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, had an interview on the radio and talked about my work in relation to Lady Gaga. He saw it as a definition of what contemporary music photography looked like. He even compared me to Anton Corbijn. And then a journalist made a headline out of that. All of a sudden everybody started to call me “the new Anton Corbijn.” It was weird, but it helped me a lot of course.”

So how does one go from living a glamorous life in New York, doing photoshoots with the world’s biggest stars, to making a book about tales from Congo? When telling Pieter that I was surprised when Congo Tales came out, he reacted at least as surprised: “That glamour has never been the point. To me, it’s about light and composition. I always like to say that it’s Dutch light, because when you walk through the Rijksmuseum, you see how all these painters were true masters of light. I grew up in Esch, in the middle of the woods, and I used to read a lot of fairy tales. In a way, the Congo Tales project was actually much closer to me than all the celebrity shoots I did.”

Congo Tales is about the local folklore from the Mbomo District in the Congolian Rainforest. The people that live there are part of the book, as everything in the book is made with collaboration with locals. “That was very important to me,” Pieter says. “I didn’t want to feel like this European white guy coming to take something from them. It’s a collaboration: they are telling their own stories, I’m just the guy that documents that in the best way I can. These stories were never written down or recorded, so this project is a way of preserving the culture. We had a Congolese philosopher in our team who clearly translated everything for us and helped us to recreate these stories. All the people you see in the photos are actual people from the village.”

The Congo Tales book has been sold worldwide, and even reached Amazon’s general best seller’s list after it was featured on the cover of the New York Times. Not only has it done very well saleswise, the book was also translated to Lingala, the local language of Congo. The organization behind the project, Tales of Us, gave 500 books to the people of Mbomo, and helped them to build a library and a cultural center where the photos are permanently exhibited.

Six of the photos have been acquired by the Rijksmuseum, and are currently exhibited at Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle. Pieter still can’t really believe it himself: “The idea that my work will be in the archive of my favorite museum in the world forever is still unreal to me. The Gaga photo was part of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York, and to be able to show that to my dad as a sign of: ‘look dad, I made it’ was extremely fulfilling. But this; I can’t describe how cool this is to me.”

In a way, it’s even hard to see a reference to his own work. If you compare the album covers he made to his latest projects, there are more differences than similarities to be recognized between them. Pieter counters: “It’s the light! Even when I was doing shoots with Ryan Leslie and Cassie, we would have huge lighting sets. I still do that. If there’s one big difference, it’s this: I don’t like fake anymore. I used to be all about the extravagant and glamorous stuff, but I think Congo Tales has changed me. It’s still staged, but it’s real. When I started photographing, I just wanted to shoot with celebrities. Now I’m more about telling a story.”

Fast forward to two weeks later, Pieter is at his last slide of the presentation. He breathes a sigh of relief as Roger proudly looks at him from his seat. After a cheering ovation from the crowd, they give each other a tight hug. Roger as “his angel”, or maybe even his knight in shining armor. Two characters in a fairy tale, leaving us curious about the rest of this beautiful story.