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While digitalization was rapidly gaining ground in the mid-1990s, Paul de Nooijer and Menno de Nooijer decided to focus their artistic efforts on photography and film in combination with theatre and performance. Their first joint performance had been in 1989 at the third Fotobienale in Enschede during a screening of the film Nobody Had Informed Me. A sequel to this modest performance followed in 1995 with the premiere of Creation/Painting with light in Hildesheim, Germany.
Paul and Menno pay tribute in their performance to the magic of the darkroom, where black changes to white and vice versa. The essence of the photographic process – writing with light – is performed here as an incantation ritual.
Inspired by the novel multimedia possibilities of the computer, in the late 1990s Paul and Menno de Nooijer consciously opted for a blend of traditional disciplines based on the ideals of the Gesamtkunstwerk Oscar Schlemmer’s interdisciplinary Bauhaus theatre. In this concept photography and film – analogue and digital – formed part of a larger, total event. The growing number of summer festivals in the Netherlands, Belgium offered them the opportunity from 2000 to present new theatre productions in the borderlands of art, performance, dance and film.
Paul and Menno de Nooijer have consistently probed the visual possibilities of the photographic medium – analogue and digital – in relation to film, theatre and visual art.