Four swimmers stand at the edge of a pool. All in the same pose, in the same tight swimming costumes, each with a pink ball in front of their face. They look so similar, as if cloned, or drilled by an unrelenting choreographer. They could win an Olympic medal in synchronised swimming. They would not be out of place in the Chinese State Circus. It’s all for show, of course, but stylised group behaviour evokes admiration and yet, there is something eerie about it at the same time. How deeply is herd behaviour ingrained in us? How unique is a human being?

Swimming Pool

Photographer Soo Burnell (Edinburgh, 1981) welcomes such musings. "My photos are the first line of a story that's just waiting to be told," she says. A sense of aesthetics is an important aspect of her work – the polished beauty acts as an inviting entrance – but she places more value on the train of thought a photograph can unleash. She positions her tightly staged figures in a cinematic setting, encouraging active engagement with the image. These are often places or buildings that balance between modernism and nostalgia. It can take time to find that particular form of architecture in any city, but anyone with an eye for it can discover plenty of beautiful examples.

Edinburgh, with its rich history, is her birthplace. There she developed the retrospective style that proves universally applicable. She lives the quietest possible life in the countryside (though the Scottish capital is comfortably close by), but she is worldly enough to appear in metropolises like Paris, London and New York. This spring, she was lured to The Hague with an "artist residency" in the monumental building erected by Albert Plesman as KLM's headquarters. Would she give her vision of The Hague from there?

Wet world

When choosing the locations, her existing portfolio served as a starting point. Soo Burnell wanted to include a classic swimming pool, if at all possible, because that's where the main story begins for her. To her utter surprise, the Victorian pool in Edinburgh where she jumped into the deep end as a child still exists. "The place was waiting for me," she says, "and I consider the photo series I developed from there a tipping point in my career." Indeed, form and story coincide beautifully. The strong rhythms of the architecture and the energy of the water, which can be felt even in the silence, perfectly highlight the scene staged with models. Since the Scottish photographer went public with this theme in 2018, she has not been able to shake it.

Although The Hague's oldest swimming pools, on Mauritskade and Weimarstraat, no longer exist in their original form, the competition pool in Zuiderpark suited her purposes in every respect. If you zoom in at the right distance, you encounter a contradiction between reason and feeling. The mathematical framing through tiles and concrete promises total control, but everything is in the service of an elusive substance: water. Burnell places the human body between these extremes.

The swimwear is highly functional and neutral, making it almost timeless. It shows how we put on a second skin to experience a wet world in person. The thin fabric that sticks to the naked body offers little protection. The water with its intense smell swallows a person. Shrill sounds bouncing back and forth are only extinguished below the surface of the water. There, visibility becomes clouded and movements viscous. Most children learn to swim in that sensory underworld.

Who does not remember the intense fear of drowning and how it dissipated on learning a contrived movement? Once you get the hang of the stroke, you practically do it without thinking. But Soo Burnell puts us back in a line on the side and reminds us of the time when we as humans, almost became fish for a fleeting moment.

Travel

To her surprise, Soo Burnell fell in love with The Hague. Its historic atmosphere as the seat of government has much in common with Edinburgh. In May 2024, she worked at locations that suited her retrospective style. They are popular spots like the jetties and main Pier at Scheveningen, as well as cultural oases like the Berlage Art Museum and the former tram depot where people can still “go on a journey” in pre-war style. Travel is another recurring theme in her fast-growing oeuvre. To thoroughly explore classic-modern The Hague, Burnell settled down for several weeks at De Plesman Residences on Plesmanweg. Together with her trusted models, who are well versed in what she wants and bring their cheerful dispositions, Burnell staged no less than 10 photo series. She also took the Plesman complex as a starting point.

The Beach II

Haasgse Bos I

Soo Burnell Plesman

Plesman purposely located the headquarters in The Hague, close to the ministries he did business with. Although KLM left for Schiphol in 1969, the spirit of the time is still in the air. Even after a recent redevelopment as a luxury residential complex and five-star hotel, the belief in progress is still palpable. The hotel, which includes long-stay suites in addition to standard rooms, is decorated with art curated by Coen van den Oever (De Galerie Den Haag Project 2.0, /Gallery). He was tipped off that Soo would be an ideal artist for the job. She had already proved that at a hotel in Edinburgh.

Magritte

No one is an island. Burnell can’t escape influences either, such as, in her case, Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967). "Oh yes, he has been a great influence!", she agrees enthusiastically, "I admire the clean way he presents the impossible."

Although she stays much closer to reality in her photographs than Magritte does in his paintings, a sense of alienation is never far away. Her scenes possess the same understated clarity with which Magritte violates reality. Also, the same archetypes return time and again. Whereas the Belgian painter floods us with images of English gentlemen in bowler hats, the Scottish photographer's “secret agents” from the 1950s constantly pop up. Actors who are more or less “undercover” thanks to their trench coats and fedoras. Her female archetypes are styled according to a cinematic dress code you might now pin the word retro on. Burnell has been toying with this for years. Where does this love for a certain period with its typical style characteristics come from?

Calm Waters

The trigger is almost always to be found in early childhood, but so incredibly much happens afterwards that almost everyone forgets that unique moment. For Burnell, too, it took quite a while after the academy for the penny to drop, even though she was on the right track early on having discovered photography at 13. She comes from an engineering family, so art was irrelevant but technical tools were well received. Her grandfather’s kind gesture funded a “darkroom” so that she could disappear into that mysterious darkness straight after school.

Red light

There, in the red light (which does not affect light-sensitive paper) and surrounded by the strong smell of chemicals, she could conjure up her own images. Anyone who learnt photography in the old, analogue way knows how magical and addictive that process can be. At the same time, you are alone with your own train of thought in the darkroom. "I am quite private," she says, "in my life and in my work. The type of people I portray are rather anonymous, or perhaps it's better to speak of the 'Everyman' sort of people."

But everyday reality does not fascinate her. She likes to play with duplication. Two women look suspiciously alike, but if you look closely, they are not identical after all. Thanks to digital darkrooms, you can repeat a figure with greater frequency in an image. And why not? Besides the alienation, there is also something very cheerful in her work. Soo is not an Asian name, but a (shortened) pet name given to her as a child. Somewhere, on an old shelf, there must be the key that unlocked her predilection for art.

"I have to think of my crazy uncle in London," she says. "He had the strangest pictures on the wall of his bathroom. Whenever I went to stay with him, I would lie in the bath for ages studying them."

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