Wiesje Peels first met the circus as a child, in her father’s one-man company, Theatro Picollini, where she was occasionally given a small part when nobody in the audience dared to volunteer. She returned to it years later with a camera, travelling with troupes in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Mimus is what she brought back.
The photographs are not reportage. Peels rehearses a scene — directing, dressing, setting the decor — then leaves room for what she cannot govern, admitting the unforeseen into the frame. Her subject is a condition she calls an in-between world: the tent emptied, the audience gone home, the performers still made up, still holding the posture of clown or acrobat. A clown stares off, absorbed. The exotic colouring usually attached to circus imagery drains away, and melancholy and solitude remain.
Peels does not read that mood as a verdict on circus life. She calls the pictures autobiographical — “I project my own mood onto the circus artists” — and the figures carry themselves like apparitions, mythic in bearing, archetypal, their individual vulnerability saying something about how people live with one another. The title follows the same logic: the Latin word for actor, and the name of the first Roman clown.
The object is substantial: 256 pages, hardcover, in Dutch, published by Komma, Uitgeverij in 2014, with Alex de Vries and Sjaak Langenberg listed as contributors alongside Peels. Its force lies in accumulation — images made across five countries, given an order rather than offered as a portfolio of strong single frames.
For a collection, the case rests on coherence rather than scarcity. This is a deliberately shaped body of work by a photographer who stayed with one subject for years and came back with a position on it; it was also among the books chosen for the Athens Photo Festival’s 2015 photobook exhibition, which places it in the hands of readers who follow the form closely. It earns its shelf.
