schemering (dusk) Photograph

born in the netherlands. live presently in the hague and berlin

In my photography I find my life. Much of the subjects that have attracted me also tell me about my own world and feelings. It is not that I set out to capture some subject , or, try to create a signature by being attached to some object which I then make my own. Rather I am looking always to the event which occurs, something that I find when I see certain situations, people places. This is really for me fascinating, and I mean that in the sense that it grabs me, possesses me, and that this is always unexpected.

I can take this example, I often photography young people, what we call adolescents. My attraction is to the whole process of change and transition in their lives, which also reminds me that I am also intensely involved in change and what we should call experience of transit, passage, or what Benjamin called 'threshold experiences', experiences between waking and sleep, night and day, sites of delicate exchange and metamorphosis. That is really it. I am not trying to capture an object, with some special value. I am fascinated, equally caught up in the experience.

Then I ask the question, where does this memory get placed, how is this event I see occur related to all that is me and has gone before. In some ways everything is autobiography, but it is an autobiography without an ego, because it is the register of those unexpected events and moments. So in some way I am always looking for keys to open more doors in experience, cross more thresholds, experience more, even of experience.

These keys sometimes just light up, there is a moment you see, and that young man I stood in front of, whose life I join however briefly, is an angel, a homeless angel, who appears, with the tremor of a wing, and then I have to find the way to literally make this memory open for others, to acknowledge this moment of divine radiance.