In the Netherlands, the main Christmas celebrations focus around the old-fashioned Saint Nicholas (Sinta Klaas) story as opposed to the more modern Father Christmas myth. Sinta Klaas, patron saint of children, is a tall white man with a long beard and cream coloured robes. He carries a golden staff and arrives in every Dutch city around the middle of November, usually in a boat, and always accompanied by his workers, Zwarte Piets (Black Petes), hundreds of them! On the day, they arrive they pour out of the boats and parade the city, Sinta Klaas on a horse and the Zwarte Piets running behind with sacks of cookies alternately smiling like clowns and then waving their batons with angry faces at the naughty children.
I first saw a Zwarte Piet when I was visiting family, at Christmas time, and was surprised by the extraordinary character before my eyes - a white woman blacked up as a Moorish man - in the UK such traditions have virtually died out and in the US, too. But here I was in the Netherlands at their largest Christmas festival and street was crowded with laughing, dancing blacked up women (and girls) in men’s clothes!
There are many stories that tell why Piet is blacked up but the most dominant one is that he/she is imitating the Moorish servants of the Spanish from the 16th and 17th centuries when they occupied the Lowlands. Once they left and The Netherlands was formed the Dutch continued to celebrate the tradition of Sinta Klaas and Zwarte Piet. Blacking up was the only way, it seemed, to achieve the desired effect.
I have been photographing Zwarte Piet, in a manner that reassembles classical Dutch portrait painting, since 1993 and made my first book and show of the work in 2000 – simply titles Zwarte Piet. Since this first book was published by Black Dog I have been watching the Christmas story in the Netherlands evolve. Mass public demonstration and occasional violent political act has forced Zwarte Piet to change his/her colour and today in most of the big cities you see a range of different colours on their faces. Most predominant is the idea to smudge the black and make it look more like soot. To make this feel real the story behind the character is also being changed and it is now said that Zwarte Piet got his/her colour from coming down the chimney (hence the smudging).
In the essay Bal Masqué, Dutch theorist Mieke Bal talks
about how the images (in the Zwarte Piet series) do more than simply document: that they work through and with the subject opening up new space for debate and thought. Towards the end of this essay Bal notes: “Anna Fox’s photographs, humorous and tender, ironic and identifying, are powerful in the way they offer art as a means to face this need (the need to identify the issue) head on...her images avoid the two most predictable attitudes a project like this might succumb to: the endorsement of reiteration and the moralism of indictment”.
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