Jan Banning (b. 1954) is a Dutch independent artist/photographer, based in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

He was born of parents from the colonial Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) and studied social and economic history. Both facts have had a strong influence on his photographic work.

His academic background is reflected not only in the historical aspects of some of his subject matter, but also in the sound intellectual basis of his projects, his conceptual approach, and his use of the typological method, comparable with sociological or anthropological classification in which he looks for variations within a tightly repeated form.

The best-known example of this is his famous series Bureaucratics, about civil servants in eight countries worldwide. Other examples are Law & Order, comparing criminal justice in four countries on four continents; and Red Utopia, about the remnants of communist parties in the world.

His parental roots (as well as his study of history) take shape in in several of his projects such as Comfort Women: a study into the traumatic long-term consequences of sexual slavery, including rape, during the Second World War; and Traces of War, about the impact of forced railway labor on POWs in South-East Asia during the same period.

Banning’s work always puts the socio-political setting at the fore and he often chooses subjects that he feels have been neglected in the arts and are difficult to visualize. The tone of his work varies from deeply emotional, e.g. in The Verdict: The Christina Boyer Case, or in the afore-mentioned Comfort Women, to humorous or even absurdist, as in The Sweating Subject.

His projects often have a personal starting point but Banning invariably places ‘private’ subjects in a wider social context. For example, when he tells how his father and grandfather were forced to do hard labour during the war, he broadens the project out to include research on the long-term effects of abuse and humiliation on European and Asian slave labourers generally.

Jan Banning lives in Utrecht, Netherlands.
For more, see www.janbanning.com