NL / EN
Lover of still lifes, paper, and photographic frames. Before devoting myself to the photobook, I exhibited both nationally and internationally. I currently teach at the Breitner Academy, the bachelor programme of Fine Art in Education at the Amsterdam University of the Arts.
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Education:
2007 – 2009 | Master of Fine Art, Sandberg Institute
2000 – 2004 | Bachelor of Fine Art in Education, Amsterdam University of the Arts
1997 – 1999 | History, University of Amsterdam
Work:
2008 – present | Lecturer, Breitner Academy, Amsterdam University of the Arts
2004 – 2014 | Museum Educator, Foam photography museum
Background:
I grew up in a house with an orchard and a vegetable garden. As a child, that half hectare of land felt infinite - I believed I lived in the largest garden in the world. There I discovered worms and trees, rotten apples, black earth, the smell of grass, manure, and a thousand places to play.
Now that I am grown, the garden has shrunk to its actual size. Yet something of that childlike connection between myself and my surroundings has remained. Kafka once noted in his diary an aphorism that keeps echoing in my mind: “The happiness of understanding that the ground on which you stand cannot be larger than the two feet that cover it.”
I sometimes think I photograph the daily wallpaper of my life simply to take a closer look at it. Within domesticity, many wondrous scenes are hidden, which I want to lift out of the routines of everyday life. The frame of a photograph alone turns even the most trivial occurrence into a scene worth pausing for with full attention.
I value it when both the photographed reality and the construction of the photograph can be perceived at once - when you take the image as true and, at the same time, recognize it as a creation. Paper, projection, film negative: the edges of the photograph are allowed to participate in its presentation. The space around the image is as present as the scene within it. The open space points toward what was not captured or framed: other moments, the remainder, the whole of life. In this way, you glimpse something of the act of looking itself.
The photobook is my habitat - a metaphorical garden with a cover as its fence, shaped by order and atmosphere. Every photobook holds many stories. The visual story of my books unfolds almost of its own accord through arrangement: the rhythm of turning pages, the amount of white space each image requires, and the combinations that belong together determine how the book takes shape. Sometimes individual photographs resist telling a story, leaving the white space between them as a silent void. It is a precise process: the images must connect and give each other room until they form a whole. Until that moment arrives, I keep composing. It is the ground on which I stand, and the feet that cover it: imagination as the child still filled with the space around them.
Lover of still lifes, paper, and photographic frames. Before devoting myself to the photobook, I exhibited both nationally and internationally. I currently teach at the Breitner Academy, the bachelor programme of Fine Art in Education at the Amsterdam University of the Arts.
2007 – 2009 | Master of Fine Art, Sandberg Institute
2000 – 2004 | Bachelor of Fine Art in Education, Amsterdam University of the Arts
1997 – 1999 | History, University of Amsterdam
Work:
2008 – present | Lecturer, Breitner Academy, Amsterdam University of the Arts
2004 – 2014 | Museum Educator, Foam photography museum
Background:
I grew up in a house with an orchard and a vegetable garden. As a child, that half hectare of land felt infinite - I believed I lived in the largest garden in the world. There I discovered worms and trees, rotten apples, black earth, the smell of grass, manure, and a thousand places to play.
Now that I am grown, the garden has shrunk to its actual size. Yet something of that childlike connection between myself and my surroundings has remained. Kafka once noted in his diary an aphorism that keeps echoing in my mind: “The happiness of understanding that the ground on which you stand cannot be larger than the two feet that cover it.”
I sometimes think I photograph the daily wallpaper of my life simply to take a closer look at it. Within domesticity, many wondrous scenes are hidden, which I want to lift out of the routines of everyday life. The frame of a photograph alone turns even the most trivial occurrence into a scene worth pausing for with full attention.
I value it when both the photographed reality and the construction of the photograph can be perceived at once - when you take the image as true and, at the same time, recognize it as a creation. Paper, projection, film negative: the edges of the photograph are allowed to participate in its presentation. The space around the image is as present as the scene within it. The open space points toward what was not captured or framed: other moments, the remainder, the whole of life. In this way, you glimpse something of the act of looking itself.
The photobook is my habitat - a metaphorical garden with a cover as its fence, shaped by order and atmosphere. Every photobook holds many stories. The visual story of my books unfolds almost of its own accord through arrangement: the rhythm of turning pages, the amount of white space each image requires, and the combinations that belong together determine how the book takes shape. Sometimes individual photographs resist telling a story, leaving the white space between them as a silent void. It is a precise process: the images must connect and give each other room until they form a whole. Until that moment arrives, I keep composing. It is the ground on which I stand, and the feet that cover it: imagination as the child still filled with the space around them.