Introducing
A Dutch Photographer Reimagines the Story of His Life
Dreamy and sun drenched, Sander Coers’s images are precociously self-assured and emotionally resonant, recalling the atmosphere of Éric Rohmer’s summer idylls.
Sander Coers learned about his grandfather’s death in a Facebook post during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. His grandfather’s wife posted a picture from the Bali Post of his corpse being removed from their home in a body bag. Helpfully, she tagged her husband in the picture. “It’s the way Indonesian people use Facebook,” Coers told me recently, “which is a cultural difference from anything we would do in Europe or in the US.”
Coers, a photographer based in Rotterdam, doesn’t know why his grandfather’s passing made the papers. His grandfather died of a heart attack, not of the deadly new disease that was then ripping across the globe. “He was just a regular guy,” Coers told me. But Coers suspects that his death caused alarm because he was technically a foreigner. His grandfather had lived most of his life in the Netherlands, after he and his mother fled the Indonesian National Revolution that erupted in the wake of World War II. He had returned to Indonesia in 2015.
Coers’s grandfather almost never talked about his childhood. Born to a Dutch colonial soldier and an Indonesian mother, he was interned with his mother in a concentration camp by the Japanese, who sent his father to Burma, where he died of an illness while working on the infamous “death railway,” a 258-mile train route between Thailand and Burma, the construction of which resulted in the deaths of 90,000 Southeast Asian civilians and 12,000 Allied prisoners of war. Later, he was persecuted by his Indonesian countrymen as they attempted to purge the islands of any trace of colonial occupation, including mixed children. After his grandfather’s death, Coers’s family discovered an extensive archive of photographs and documents that he had compiled: pieces of a family history shattered by war and upheaval. His return to Indonesia had been a part of a quest to hunt down the ghosts of his past.
When his grandfather died, Coers was finishing his master’s degree in photography at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, where he was working on a project, Come Home, that dealt with issues of masculinity, self-discovery, and memory. Another project, Blue Mood (Al Mar) (2021–22), with similar concerns, followed shortly after his graduation. Dreamy and sun drenched, these pictures are precociously self-assured and emotionally resonant, recalling the atmosphere of Éric Rohmer’s summer idylls. Coers explained that the work sprang from a reckoning with the nostalgic pull of his provincial hometown of Terneuzen, which he grew up longing to escape. By returning home and attempting to capture something akin to the memories of his youth, he sought to revisit and reimagine the story of his life.
Coers began a new pair of projects in the wake of his grandfather’s passing, POST (2023–24) and Eulogy (2024–ongoing), in which he expanded the ambit of his fascination with the slippery nature of memory and identity to encompass his family’s history as well as his own. In POST, Coers fed photos from old family albums into an AI model, which then spit fragmentary facsimiles of a past that never existed: a dark-skinned man frolicking in a field of flowers; a white boy splashing through the surf; the slope of a man’s suit jacket shoulder. Coers’s interest in masculinity, which anchored his earlier work, is broadened here to include the question of cultural heritability.
“The way I view AI is that it’s sort of a collective memory of humankind,” Coers told me. But he is aware that AI constructs our collective memory strangely. It produces images that are more archetype than archive, assemblages of our collective fantasies about ourselves. Underscoring the constructed nature of these AI images, and, by extension, the cobbled together quality of both masculinity and memory, Coers UV printed the pictures from this project on plywood, adding extra material and metaphoric dimensions to his work.
For Eulogy, an ongoing project he began in 2024, Coers delved deeper into his grandfather’s past, and the legacies of colonialism and conflict that shaped it. As in POST, he continued to work with both AI-generated images and archival materials, but he also journeyed to Indonesia to make pictures of his own. The resulting works, some of which are printed on hand-glazed tile as well as plywood, provide gauzy, evocative glimpses of a past both idealized and indistinct. It is a time that Coers knows only through pictures, that his grandfather sought first to forget, and then, perhaps, redeem through remembrance.
Coers is continuing his grandfather’s final project, but he’s doing so with the knowledge that it is a futile one. Looking at these works, I am reminded of a passage in a letter written by the fictional protagonist of Chris Marker’s great cinematic disquisition on memory, San Soleil. “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,” Marker writes through his character, “which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.
