Moving culture, individuals portrayed in day to day life
In a documentary way Diana van der Ley registers what happens in public. Her work shows how society is changing by focussing on the group processes and the individual bodylanguage. Like the photograph Nieuwjaarsduik where each group has its own hero. Carnaval shows the event as a micro society: an organized chaos with clear rituals and rules that must be known or one will be expelled. The complete story of an event is told in a single panorama, in which several images are combined.
Diana van der Ley works in the tradition of the old Dutch painters, who
used a brush to paint impressions of daily life. In this tradition, that
probably started with Pieter Bruegel de Oude, social tendencies within society
were shown in the paintings.