It’s ironic that the most basic and essential artistic tools we have — our hands — are so difficult to represent in pieces of art. Hands are notoriously difficult to paint. And they’re equally difficult to photograph, given that the moment you point your camera at a hand, the outcome is likely to come across as too staged, too heavy-handed (please excuse the inadvertent pun). Even Silicon Valley’s image-thievery-and-regurgitation (“AI”) tools struggle with hands, giving them too many fingers or morphing them into unsightly blobs.
There is something intriguing about the fact that as essential as they are in our daily lives, for works of art hands do not play as huge a role as one might imagine. Greek or Roman statues, for example, which might have been preserved without their extremities still powerfully convey what they were meant to.
“Their hands shamelessly reveal their innermost secrets,” the main character in Stefan Zweig’s Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman says of gamblers she is observing in a casino. You can’t photograph secrets, though, and a photograph of a hand mostly remains that, a photograph of a hand. This is mostly because as tools, hands live from their actions, from how they move and what they do. In a photograph (or painting or sculpture), all of that is lost.
In a nutshell, this means that as an artist you have two choices. You can either attempt to render hands as faithfully as possible, which in photography means to capture them in such a fashion that things don’t look staged. As anyone knows who has ever had to pose someone, it’s the hands that result in the biggest difficulties. Alternatively, you can photographs hands not as what they are but what they are used for.
As it turns out, hands are malleable tools that can be used to communicate as well: sign language. Even if you have not learned sign language to communicate words without sound, chances are that your vocabulary of sign language is larger than you might imagine.
Furthermore, your knowledge of sign language is very much localized. Move to a different cultural background, and the same symbols can mean very different things. I found out when I moved to the US from Germany (you might imagine that this hardly was much of a change in cultural background), and a vast part of the symbols I used to form with my hands or the gestures I used them for became meaningless.
Even if people do not understand what you are trying to tell them with your hands, they know that it must mean something. In effect, even when almost no communication is possible, a smile and some hand gestures go a long way. And therein lies some potential for art making.
Ilse Oosterkamp‘s Fingers demonstrates how this can be done. The idea of the book is very, very simple. Each photograph shows a single hand that is contorted in some fashion (against a black background). As a viewer, one quickly realizes that it’s the same hand. That’s because the fingers look the same in all of the photographs, but also because the contortions rely on a form of flexibility most people’s hands simply don’t have.
Each photograph is presented on its own spread (there is an overview of all of them at the end). On the opposite page, there is a block of pastel colour. I have no way of knowing what led to the addition of colour in the book, but it’s a crucial aspect: without the colour, the book would almost inevitably be seen as a typology of hands. Whatever you want to say about typologies, they’re cerebral and mostly devoid of emotion.
Here, the colours add a sense of emotion to the photographs, and it is that sense of emotion that pulls the viewer towards trying to understand those hands and what they might mean to say.
They don’t mean to say anything.
If you read the short text that is included in the inside of the book’s dust jacket in the front, you learn that Melle, the young person whose hand is photographed, has multiple disabilities. “As a result,” Oosterkamp writes, “he can effortlessly create short-lived sculptures with his fingers.”
The knowledge of this information does nothing to lessen the book’s impact.
Regardless of whether you view the hand as forming a sculpture or as communicating in a code you are not familiar with, it’s clear that you’re being brought into a person’s own little world, a world in which these hand gestures frozen in time have their own meaning.
Fingers; photographs by Ilse Oosterkamp; 64 pages; Van Zoetendaal; 2025
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