An encounter with Chas Gerretsen
Last week I had the privilege of photographing Chas Gerretsen at home. A photographer who moved through the world with a camera in his hand, from war zones to film sets, from history to imagination. I have known his images for a long time. I did not know the silence of his presence.
What struck me most was not the past he carries, but the calm with which he looks now. No pose. No emphasis. Just a gaze that has seen everything, and still remains open.
From icon to person
During the session, the image shifted slowly. From the icon we recognise to the person sitting across from you. And eventually to something quieter still: the relationships around him, the places where a life becomes visible.
About Chas Gerretsen
The Wonderbar Life of Chas Gerretsen tells the remarkable story of Charles âChasâ Gerretsen, a Dutch photographer whose life reads like an adventure novel.
Born in 1943 in Groningen, he left home at sixteen, driven by curiosity and a hunger for experience. After travelling through Europe, he settled in Australia in the early 1960s and worked rugged, unconventional jobs, including as a crocodile hunter in Queensland, while beginning to experiment with photography.
In 1963 he moved to the United States, worked with cattle in Texas, and bought his first movie camera, an early step towards visual storytelling. In 1967, arriving in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, he shifted into photojournalism, embedding with soldiers and documenting conflict for major international news outlets.
His reputation was cemented in 1973 during the coup in Chile, where he made an iconic photograph of Augusto Pinochet. The image earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal, making him the only Dutch photographer to receive this honour for frontline war photography.
In the midâ1970s his path turned to Hollywood. Between 1975 and 1989 he worked as a stills and set photographer on over a hundred feature films, including Francis Ford Coppolaâs Apocalypse Now, capturing behindâtheâscenes moments with Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper and Martin Sheen, images that reveal both glamour and the surreal intensity of filmmaking.
Chas and Monica
Photographing someone with their partner changes the temperature of the room. It shifts the story from achievement to belonging. The work remains present, but it is no longer the only thing that matters.
Chas and his sister
With his sister, something else appeared: lightness, disruption, origin. A gesture that says: âI knew you before everything.â
What photography can do
This series is not about fame or history. Itâs about proximity, about what becomes visible when someone no longer has to prove anything. Perhaps that is photographyâs quiet power: not documenting what someone has done, but revealing who someone is, in a moment of silence.
Prints or exhibition possibilities? Send me a message.