Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen
Above: Tim Groen: Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen, Amsterdam Hair and Make-Up: Aga Urbanovic

Back in her art school years, she had to defend her work against her professors’ critique: “Too staged, not natural.” But (ever the contrarian) she never veered from the path she was on; artist and commercial photographer Elsbeth Struijk van Bergen still draws major inspiration from the particular beauty of film-stills. 
At this point Elsbeth has fully embraced her cinematographic flair, and is taking her work to increasingly lush and dramatic levels. Numéro, Surface, ELLE, FRAME, Esquire, Visionaire, and many others have commissioned her for portraiture and fashion, or for her stylish blend of the two. Several years ago the photographer had an epiphany, she realized that she always incorporates architecture in her work.  
Her increased sense of focus on architecture as a cultural instrument made architects take notice. She was commissioned to photograph a period-restored Gerrit Rietveld apartment in the Netherlands. And when architectural firm UNStudio approached her to create publicity images for a newly completed project, it eventually inspired Elsbeth to embark on the work she is in the process of creating right now;  a major series of photographs taking place in and around international UNStudio projects.  Ben van Berkel, UNStudio’s co-founder and Principal Architect: “Elsbeth doesn’t see architecture as buildings alone. Her conceptual approach describes how we perceive people within specific spaces and how we ‘dress’ ourselves in architecture.”
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Alia Penner by TimGroen
Above: Tim Groen: Alia Penner, New York

What Yayoi Kusama is to polka dots, Alia Penner is to multicolor anything. Not to oversimplify her talent, but everything she touches turns to rainbows. Or stripes or concentric squares or whatever else fits the surface.
In the time I’ve know her, Alia has painted on an old schoolbus as a background for an H&M campaign, created a teenage-girl’s-bedroom-set for a Vans event, flown to Paris to help create an installation at Colette, and designed a one-night environment at the Standard Hotel in LA (where she lives). Her graphic design is uniquely hers; a mixture of Peter Blake-meets-Haight Ashbury with beautiful, friendly hand type. Her non-commissioned art is currently (literally) going through a growth spurt: “It’s getting bigger and more abstract,” she explains, “And hopefully at some point I can fill up an entire room. No, make that a whole house.“

You know how, sometimes, when you’ve seen a really great movie, you keep thinking about it for a couple of days after the fact? That’s what happened to me when Alia walked in on the day I took her portrait.
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Eleonore Hendricks by Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: Eléonore Hendricks, New York

During her mid-teens she was shot by Bruce Weber, Mark Borthwick , Ellen von Unwerth, Terry Richardson and Juergen Teller . She appeared in Vogue Italia, did Versace campaigns, and saw her own face as photographed by David Simms drive by on New York City buses and, yes, on movie theatre popcorn bags, thanks to the omnipresent CK1 campaign. She was a waif when waifs were what Dr. Fashion ordered. I’m referring to Eléonore Hendricks, who has since moved on to become an actress and a photographer, and she takes both disciplines equally seriously. Beautiful and smart by any standard, Eléonore attended Smith College, where her interest in portraiture of women was sparked. She’s a native New Yorker and her father is Jon Hendricks, nr. 1 Fluxus expert/curator, and author of the awesome Fluxus Codex. She takes acting classes from Louise Lasser (Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), and is dating Josh Safdie, of Red Bucket Films, in whose projects she stars.
So, you see, it’ll be hard to find a girl who’s cooler then Eléonore Hendricks. “I need somebody to prod me along with electrical shocks a couple of times a day,” she laughs, “just to get me off my ass!” But I don’t believe it one bit.
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Jacqueline Hassink by Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: Jacqueline Hassink, New York

Photographer/artist Jacqueline Hassink wouldn’t mind taking a break, but in the near future that’s just not in the stars for her. “I’m making a movie in the Buddhist temples of Kyoto, working on a book about Japanese gardens for German publisher Hatje Cantz, and researching a project on the new economy in China.” The New York-based—but always traveling—artist has assistants in New York, as well as in Amsterdam and Tokyo, and she keeps them busy according to the flow of projects. “Whatever I can delegate, I push away.” Right now she’s compiling a book on her haute couture Fitting Rooms series, for which she was allowed to photograph the fitting rooms (discreetly sans customers) of some of the world’s most exclusive couturiers. And she is creating a hi-tech sequel to what is probably one of her most well-known projects; The Table of Power, on which she first worked from 1993 to 1995. Considering her preference for corporate and formal subject matters, I wasn’t expecting for us to be laughing as much as we did.
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Bas Kosters By Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: Bas Kosters, Amsterdam

“It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it,” could be the mantra of Bas Kosters, the energizer bunny of the Dutch fashion scene. His bright, cartoonish, vaguely 1970’s children’s television-inspired characters appear on anthing from baby carriages and beer cans, to, of course, his own collections. Relatively new to prêt-a-porter, he has been creating one-off fashion items for a small group of eccentric devotees since 2005, when he founded Bas Kosters Studio. Additionally he has been crafting fabric dolls; life size dolls, small dolls, cushion dolls, dolls with genitalia, all kinds of dolls, as if to populate his own parallel universe with whimsy. But whatever it is that Bas is doing, and whomever he is doing it with or for, it all clearly leads back to his own, highly personal narrative.
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Scooter LaForge by Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: Scooter LaForge, New York

Scooter LaForge by Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: Scooter LaForge, New York

Scooter LaForge, Artist

We all know that sex sells mascara, tabloids, cars, music, and hotels. That it sells art too, is something Scooter LaForge can tell you from experience.
Giant erections live happily with cuddly Little-Golden-Books-creatures, in a world that’s dark yet comical, figurative yet abstract, muddy yet bright. Scooter LaForge, painter/sculptor, is a man of dichotomies. He’s modest and soft-spoken in person, but certainly not too shy to pose for risqué photographs which find their way into the world through one of his X-rated tumblr blogs. Scooter’s studio is around the corner from me; in the midst of oil paint fumes, and surrounded by some canvases that had yet to find their way online, we talked.
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Koos Van Den Akker By Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: Koos van den Akker, New York

Koos van den Akker, Designer

“This is my life’” says Koos. “Could I have made more money? Absolutely. But that would have happened at the expense of what I wanted.” What Koos wanted was to travel, to be around glamour, and have an all-round fabulous life. Talking to Koos is fun; he curses like a sailor and, being in his early 70’s now, he has no patience for false modesty—which I love.
As a handsome gay young man in New York in the 1970’s, Koos had the right age, in the right place, at the right time. Not everyone got what he was doing, but once Koos set up shop, it didn’t take long for the celebrities (of the caliber he obsessed on as a kid) to take note. When times changed business sizzled out a bit, but within two decades a new generation of fashion designers, including Marc Jacobs and Nicholas Ghesquiere, rediscovered Koos and cited him as a major source of inspiration. There is so much to talk about with Koos that I feel like I’m leaving too much out, like the celebrities, or the amazing apartments he has lived in in New York. Or how much fun Koos has had with the love of his life. Recapping seven decades in less then 2000 words just isn’t feasible; here are some of the things we did talk about.
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Charlotte Dumas by Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: Charlotte Dumas, New York

Charlotte Dumas, Photographer

Ask Dutch photographer Charlotte Dumas about her preference for animal portraiture and she’ll turn as enigmatic as the Scandinavian wolves she spent an entire year photographing. “It was an intuitive development,” she explains at one point.
The Amsterdam-based photographer and her American husband were in New York for half a week, to attend the opening reception for her solo show, Repose, at Julie Saul Gallery.
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David van de Leer by Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: David van der Leer, New York

David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, Guggenheim Museum

David van der Leer initially never pictured himself living in New York –he thought it would be London—but he’s here alright. And now that he is, this Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design is changing the way we look at architecture and design exhibitions. Thanks to David, you can’t even really call them exhibitions anymore, because he is blurring the very definition of that word by creating events that take place outside of museum walls. Events which may not even be about presenting the audience with anything tangible.
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Will Lewis by Tim Groen
Above: Tim Groen: Will Lewis, New York, 2010

Will Lewis, Model

“Shaving didn’t become the norm in the Western world until the 1920’s”, Will Lewis says, to make the point that “obviously the suit was predominantly worn by men with beards.” We’re discussing the somewhat square and ethnocentric reaction to his presence in a certain popular American catalog. “…Full beards on men in fashion shows just make us giggle,” Cathy Horyn recently wrote in The New York Times, another reference to a Will Lewis appearance; this time on the Jean Paul Gaultier runway.
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