Jan Banning is an independent Dutch photographic artist. He gained worldwide recognition with his book and exhibition Bureaucratics (2008), which focuses on bureaucrats in eight countries on five continents. The work was exhibited in museums and galleries in over 20 countries and published in many more.
In his photographic work, the socio-political setting is generally at the forefront, and he often chooses subjects that are difficult to visualize: state power, consequences of conflicts, and criminal justice. Sometimes his work results from an approach relying on sociological or anthropological classification; other times, it focuses more on the individual psychological impact of major social events.” All in all, his work is almost always about people and society; but occasionally, he ventures into other forms of photography, such as landscapes.
Banning was born to parents from the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) and studied social and economic history. These two facts have strongly influenced his photographic work.
His roots are expressed in the choice of subjects, e.g. Comfort Women: women forced to become sex slaves to the Japanese army during the Second World War; Traces of War: Survivors of the Burma and Sumatra Railways, about former forced laborers in South-East Asia during the same period.
His academic background is reflected not only in the historical aspects of his themes, but also in his research, the sound intellectual basis of his projects, his frequently conceptual approach, and his use of the typological method: visual research in which he looks for variations within a tightly repeated form.
Banning occasionally describes himself as an ‘artivist.’ He is not content with merely interpreting themes through documentary work; he also strives to bring about change, using both his work and his reputation.
His 2022 ‘artivist’ project, The Verdict: The Christina Boyer Case, is a US criminal justice case study of a wrongfully convicted woman in Georgia who has been incarcerated for over 30 years. He is also involved in efforts to secure her release.
Banning’s work is included in collections of museums such as the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and in many other museums and corporate and private art collections in the US and Europe. In 2020, his photo Moroccan girl (Nissrine) reading an application form for an “inburgeringscursus” (citizenship course) at a closed window was sold at a Phillips auction in London for GBP 23,750 (USD 30,000+).
He also publishes his work regularly in media such as The Guardian Weekend, Le Monde Magazine, Geo Germany and many others.
Independent artist/photographer Jan Banning lives in Utrecht, Netherlands.
