These ‘Crazy Veggies’ are outcasts. Pariahs of society. They can not be sold in the shop because they are imperfect. They could infect vegetables with their speckles, bumps and bulges. No one wants to buy them anymore. They are a mockery of our advanced technology. After all, we want perfection! Whether it’s babies, our bodies and wrinkle-free faces or our food.
There are no closed doors for the advancing science. We continue to move in the direction of total control and perfection. We manipulate to our total joy.
But what happens if you do not join in that race? If you are not perfect? If nature raises its headstrong head? If cucumbers are not straight, turnips look like cuttlefish and tubers like old hunchbacked males?
Then you get art.
Hans de Kort captures ‘crazy veggies’ on the glass plate with the collodion technique. They have escaped the selection on the conveyor belt and are given a second life in the photo studio. Only about 1 to 2% of the harvest is imperfect, but farmers now proudly present their freaky vegetables to the photographer.
‘To infinity and beyond’: for Hans de Kort the ‘beyond’ is the discovery of manual photography that is more than digital perfection. By varnishing the back of the glass plate with asphaltum, the vegetables get a second life and their ugliness changes into an alien beauty.