foam magazine # 28 talent
What got you interested in photo graphy? The first thing I noticed about photography was that I could use it to translate my everyday environment into something more exciting. It was a way of bringing colour into my situation, which was rapidly desaturating at the time. A way out mentally and physically. Eventually it evolved from simply adding some vibrancy to my perception into adding more meaning as well. How has your degree in so cial work affected the way you take pictures, and in deed look at the world? Becoming a social worker was about learning to reflect on the way I perceived myself and others, and then communicating it. I was trained to look past the surface of an experience. It’s actually quite similar to what I do now. I was confronted with the limitations of my rational way of interpreting the world. I realized I was a social worker who observed keenly but was emotionally handicapped. A year or so later, as a photography student, my overly rational interpretation of images resulted in an inability to understand some key photographs in Robert Franks’ The Americans. After spending a few months analyzing those images in various ways, I realized they referred to much more than what they superficially showed; they spoke in complex metaphors. Such a way of seeing things made photography and my experience of the world far more interesting, and it stayed with me. I love the fact that your book starts with doodles on really tedious officepad paper. For me a whole set of emotions arises that remind me of the limited time I’ve spent in corpo rate environments. What was your own experience of that? I spent ten months as a social worker intern in an office environment. The things that fascinated me most were the ways in which we were all trying to retain a sense of individuality while having to conform to all kinds of written and unwritten rules. I wasn’t any good at it and became frustrated. My office had posters of tropical getaways on the walls, a chair to take breaks in and a creaking door to wake me up.
How did the idea for the book come about? Think of an ice cube melting in a glass of water. Then play it backwards. The idea came floating to the surface and took shape over the total span of the project. I did not start out with an idea of what I was going to show. I let intuition guide me. So in order to put into words what I was doing, I had to analyse a part of myself that doesn’t manifest itself logically.
‘Seemingly mundane situations turned into drama.’ interview by Anne-Celine Jaeger
For instance, one of my fixations was fuzzy-haired women. The images I shot of them revealed little of their faces. Virtually all the women in the book are photographed this way. After putting some thought into it, I came to the conclusion that they symbolize emotional malnourishment. Although I now had an explanation, it didn’t feel satisfactory. It felt as if the conversion into words had degraded the images, the same way as rational thinking degrades reality. I feel that a lot of the emotions elic ited in the viewer are achieved just through the subject, through the very specific lighting you use. How did you work out how to shoot it? Before I shot the office series, I briefly worked on a documentary set in a bread factory. The fluorescent lighting really bothered me. Too dim and too difficult to colour-balance, especially since I’m partially colour blind. As an experiment I took a battery-powered flash unit with me. I put my lights on maximum output to overpower the colour contamination from the strip lighting. Then a strange thing happened. Seemingly mundane situations turned into drama. People who sang performed musical scenes. This confused and fascinated me. At the end of the project I started questioning the documentary value of images that seem to relate more to fiction than to reality. That was when I started working on Terry.
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By presenting diptychs of characters that are very similar and yet slightly different, you create tension and lend your work a filmic quality. Were you inspired by specific films or artists? I was influenced by many years of media input. The ease with which candid reality becomes interpreted as scripted fiction was something I found fascinatingly scary. The loss of realism resonated with my experience in an office. The first five months that I worked on the project I was an assistant to photographer Niels Stomps. I learned a lot from his strong reliance on his gut feeling and his way of combining differently themed blocks of images to build large bodies of work. I look up to him like an older brother. He’s still a mentor to me. Most of the other aspects of my book found their way into my project either by chance or necessity. For instance, the dark backgrounds were a welcome result of having only two lights. The diptychs came into being only during the editing process. Graphic designer Syb and I decided to humanize what would otherwise have remained ciphers. What was the single most inspiring thing you witnessed this year? Reading Masanobu Fukuoka’s The OneStraw Revolution. It’s a book by a Japanese farmer who came to the realization that all his efforts to manipulate agricultural land were based on the wrongheaded idea that nature can be fully understood. Solutions for agriculture that avoided ploughing, weeding, trimming, fertilizers and pesticides were elegant and presented themselves to him through basic observation. Amazingly, his yields were even higher than before and among the highest that had ever been recorded. •