A conversation with Exactitudes on subcultures, visual codes, and what lingers beneath the surface.
Featured on Semester Magazine, SUPSI, 2026
When your idealized self stops being just an idea, it clothes itself. Through the curious dance between identity and subculture, Exactitudes gives us a lens to explore the human desire for belonging. Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek started documenting visual cues in Rotterdam in the mid-90s, when the gabber scene had just taken the city by storm and a unified look emerged. What began as a series of portraits soon became something larger: an ongoing, three-decade-long taxonomy of how people dress, gather, signal, and position themselves.
Their method has a memorable shape: a grid composed of four horizontal rows and three vertical ones. Inside, you see iterations of the same style on different people, spotted in everyday life and brought under the same roof for a photograph. People stand alone against a white backdrop and what emerges is striking. We like to think of ourselves as unique, yet there might be solace in what ties us together after all.
To observe groups in real life and sense their relevance through instinct and experience requires a deep understanding of society as a whole. In this exchange, you’ll read how their practice unfolds across time: how a gut feeling becomes a series, how meaning shifts when a visual code proves deceptive, and what exactly makes something an Exactitude. You’ll encounter their reflections on the digital age, on algorithmic identities, on the strange loop between street and industry, and more.
What comes into focus is an anthropological masterpiece disguised as portraiture. The mirror is held up to us; it shows not just what we wear, but what we want/believe ourselves to be.
- You got your start photographing the gabber scene in Rotterdam in the mid-90s. Was there a particular moment, amid those early portraits, that triggered the possibility of turning the series into an ongoing project? What pushed you to pursue and systematize these everyday codes of belonging?
At that time, the gabber scene was so massive, so urgent and so all over Rotterdam that we had to document it. It almost appeared overnight, and it was unified identity in your face! We started to document the gabbers by inviting them from the raves into our studio and we immediately knew that this methodology of documenting could be applied to other groups as well.
- How do your contemporary series take shape, from noticing a pattern, to gaining access and eventually photographing it? Does it differ from your early practice?
Ideally, a contemporary Exactitude series is almost made in the same manner as in the early 90s. We have to witness the person or the group and we must observe it in real life to check whether it's relevant enough for us. Of course nowadays profiles on social media, and the specific networks behind them, can give you reassurance or more depth in research. But, in the end, “real” is a concept you feel. The actual encounter is as important as ever. And a social identity is as real as ever.
- What makes you commit to documenting a particular group? How do you know "this is an Exactitude"?
It's a gut feeling based on the experience gained over three decades of analyzing consumer culture. Apart from that, it needs to fit into the bigger story of Exactitude as in an interconnected story.
- Can you tell me about a specific Exactitude that challenged or shifted your thinking? Maybe a group where the visual codes worked differently than you expected, or where you had to rethink the meaning of belonging?
In the Reli Rockers series you look at long-haired guys wearing heavy metal style T-shirts. But when you analyze the messages on their shirts, and even recognize the bands, you begin to notice that it's not about heavy-metal or Satan but the complete opposite. The message is that Satan sucks, and guitars for Christ. Styling is the essential detail.
- Has the digital sphere changed how people show up in public spaces—the way codes are worn, repeated, and staged—and has that altered what you see through the lens?
Yes. At the moment, most looks are predictable due to accelerated returns on the internet. Only when there is a shift, an unexpected change of people in that look do you start to re- think again.
- From your early work to now, has anything shifted in how identities form? Do today’s conditions produce a different sense of belonging, or not really?
There is a time before the Internet and after, and in our work from analogue to digital. When people spend hours looking at a screen instead of using that time to meet others in real life, for actual discussions, for actual laughing, for actual reading, for actual sex, for actual helping, you know the answer. Identities can be experienced nowadays as algorithmic echoes, not lived but performed. But you can’t change class and income.
- Your archive has become part of fashion's vocabulary—brands reference you, collaborate with you. What’s that like to witness? Has it changed how you think about the exchange between the streets and the industry?
Thank you for the compliment. Strangely enough that was in line with expectations ☺. Uniformed Identity thinking combined with rave culture, and normal banality, probably people were ready for it . The first edition of the book in 2002 with 58 series immediately became a kind of collector’s piece for people in the know. And the Gabber Exactitudes in Raf Simons the Fourth Sex, also positioned the work in its early phase.
Nowadays the currency and the very essence of youth is traded and sold out in a sec to investors and shareholders – meaning if you buy into it, you become a part of it. But do you really? Therefore, we concentrate a lot on older people, to escape all of this thinking and enjoy the encounters and the stories behind the looks.
- What’s helped you stay centered in the work over the years? Is there someone, a recurring conversation, a book, a tool, or even a place, you turn to when you need to reconnect with what Exactitudes is really about?
A metaphor for photography is the window or the mirror. You stay centered because you are mirroring yourself in the others as an active tool of gaining knowledge. Research by making.
- For students wondering how to sustain a practice across time, what’s actually kept you going through the past three decades?
A lovely gift from Sport Banger London says: “An authentic path may take longer but the moves and impact are forever legendary!”!
- When you imagine someone discovering Exactitudes fifty years from now, what do you hope they’ll feel?
Humanity.
More Works
Homepage