VC PROJECTS

opening reception: october 4, 2025

from 2 - 5 pm

exhibition dates: October 4 - November 8, 2025

El Nido by VC Projects, 1028 1/2 N. Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90029

It’s the realm of being that to me equals a treasure chest at the bottom of the ocean, more beautiful than a tapestry woven of the finest materials in a wide variety of colors. - Ester Spitz “ES”

ES: Ester Spitz and Pim Kops
Writings and Photographs 1981–1983

“I'm somewhere at the top of the theater in the dark. Next to me is a spotlight. I have my thoughts here. I have a good view—the spectacle is far away in the depths. I shine light on it.” ES

This exhibition presents an intimate dialogue between word and image—between the a study based on journals by Ester Spitz and the evocative black-and-white photographs of Pim Kops. Drawn from formative years (1981–1983), the works trace the interior life of a young woman and the visual impressions of an observer moving quietly through the world.

At the heart of ES is a study of existence. The writings, culled from decades of notebooks, do not document a single identity but rather offer a lens into the human condition: its repetitions, its questions, its emotional contours. It is not a memoir, nor a conventional autobiography—but a meditation on consciousness, presence, and becoming. Each entry becomes a fragment of lived time, a mirror to the readers’ own inner landscape.

The accompanying photographs by Pim Kops, taken in the same era, serve as quiet witnesses. They reflect a parallel solitude—a gaze attuned to nuance, atmosphere, and the unspoken. Through these images, we glimpse the exterior world and intimate silences. They become metaphors for the interior terrain charted in Spitz’s writing.

Together, this collaboration explores vulnerability, resilience, and the poetics of the everyday. It is an offering of perspective: the written word from within, the photograph from without—both part of a greater act of witnessing.

More than anything, ES invites us to pause and reflect. To consider the theatre of being from a distance. To shine a light. And to listen.

HAVE BOOTS FIXED PICK UP DRESS - Ester Spitz from “ES”

I did not know I opened a book and disappeared to another life. We stood in the corridor of the stately canal house when he told me I got the part.
Suddenly there was a tree, in bloom. First there was nothing and then it was there.
I went down a staircase and down a narrow corridor, at the end of the corridor there was a door, I went through the door and entered a large room with a marble floor and large windows overlooking a garden and the backs of the houses of the next canal. There was a lot of light, sunlight flooded into the room. I entered the room and he smiled at me. He sat at a table by the window, got up, shook my hand and said, ‘I am Julien’. I sat down opposite him. He was wearing a striped Oxford shirt. He told me he lives in America and knows the school where I took classes very well. He looked at me and asked me questions. He liked my answers. He smiled, he paid attention to me in a way that no one ever has. He looked at me as if everything I said and did were wonderful little miracles that I was scattering around, he looked at me as if one is supposed to be precisely like I am. - Ester Spitz from “ES”

I wonder about reality.
When, as a child, I would look up at the starry sky, I would get scared. Because it would remind me of the concept of infinity, because that phenomenon is not present in everyday life. It would feel like a short circuit in my brain. Reality would stop making sense.
Being in an unfamiliar environment, far away from home, could result in similar experiences. When we were in Switzerland, and I saw mountains for the first time, I thought that maybe we are actually minuscule, like ants, or even invisible, to a world that is much larger than ours, a world so large that we cannot see it. And sometimes when I would be in the car with papa, and I would look up at the sky, which I thought looked like a dome, I thought I saw the outside of the dome of another world.

I am wondering if our reality is really just a story. - Ester Spitz from “ES”

About the Artists

Pim Kops is a Dutch photographer and musician best known as a longtime member of the influential band De Dijk. He began his photographic practice in the 1970s, developing and printing in the darkroom of Cas Oorthuys. Since 2009, his photographic work has focused on atmospheric black-and-white scenes of Amsterdam and was published in the photobook Amsterdam (2015).

Ester Spitz is a Dutch writer and poet. Born in the Netherlands and based in Los Angeles since 1985, she has worked in theater, experimental performance, and film. Since 2010, she has been developing the ES series—a lyrical, long-form exploration of life, psyche, and emotional passage. The first volume was published in March 2020.

Forward:

The collaboration between Ester Spitz and Pim Kops, created between 1980 and 1983, is situated within a lineage of artistic exchanges where writing and photography intertwine to articulate the complexity of being. Their work is deeply personal yet resonates with broader cultural currents of the time, when European art and literature sought to reconcile private experience with the shifting landscape of modernity.

Ester Spitz’s writings, a study based on journals, offers a candid account of the self in formation. They oscillate between confession and meditation, narrative and fragment—echoing a tradition of women diarists yet also moving toward something less easily categorized. These writings are existential in tone, probing identity, desire, and the search for meaning.

Pim Kops’s photographs, meanwhile, preserve not simply the appearance of a subject but the atmosphere of intimacy itself. In these portraits of Ester, we encounter both presence and distance: the immediacy of her gaze and posture, and the quiet knowledge that the camera inevitably frames and fixes. Susan Sontag observed that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed” (On Photography, 1977). Yet Kops’s images complicate this notion. They do not reduce Ester to an object of possession but instead reveal the reciprocal vulnerability of artist and muse. The camera here becomes not an instrument of control but a medium of trust.

Together, these writings and images construct a shared phenomenology of being. They are documents of youth and love, but also records of an existential search that transcends biography. What we witness is not only a relationship captured in fragments but also a cultural inquiry into intimacy, and creativity in late-20th-century Europe.

Four decades later, their reunion in this exhibition allows us to revisit the question Sontag posed: what does it mean to preserve an instant, to fix in language or image what is by nature ephemeral? In the case of Spitz and Kops, the answer lies not in permanence but in resonance. These works endure because they remain unfinished, open—inviting each reader and viewer to continue the dialogue.

— Victoria Chapman, curator

curatorial notes: Behind the Exhibition: ES

Writings by Ester Spitz and Photographs by Pim Kops

The process of shaping ES has been, above all, an act of listening—listening to words written in solitude and to photographs that carry their own quiet silences. From this, a rhythm began to emerge: the writings reveal the interior life, while the photographs witness the exterior.

I have taken my cues from the writer and the lens artist, allowing them to guide me on a journey through text and imagery. Ester’s selection of text is not delivered to each photograph but instead remains abstract, luminous, and mystifying. Word and image intertwine, weaving a narrative that does not belong solely to either artist but instead opens toward each viewer or reader. In this way, ES becomes a meditation on the human condition—what it means to be free, full of life, melancholy, or even to question reality itself.

The curation has been an experiment, setting up parameters that could be completely demolished. Ester is shaping much of the photographic selection herself, choosing based on story or image, and on what these memories mean to her today. This openness yields the immersive experience of ES. Pim, who has mountains of photographs from that time, offers a vast visual archive—but I was clear that the exhibition should not simply present an array of sumptuous images. It is not a portrait of beauty, but a meditation on emotion, memory, and the human condition: movements of bliss, wonder, and solitude.

To curate ES is to hold a dialogue between past and present, interior and exterior, word and image. It is to create a space where consciousness is mirrored back, and where viewers may find themselves reflected in the theatre of being.

- Victoria Chapman, Curator

studio events RELATED TO THIS EXHIBITION:

Saturday, October 4th - opening reception - (2-5 pm)

saturday, October 11th - open tea (2 - 5 pm)

Saturday, October 18th - Ester Spitz/ book signing and discussion about “ES” (2 - 5 pm)

Saturday, October 25th - photo discussion and Ester Spitz comments on being the muse ( 2 - 5 pm)

Saturday, November 1st - open tea (2-5 pm)

Saturday, November 8th - closing reception (2 - 5 pm)