Bio

My early childhood was wonderful, in that small village in Groningen. I spent endless hours playing football on grassy fields, building dens, lighting little fires, and skating through the winters to neighboring villages.

Every summer, my mother, my older sister and I went to Ameland, where the days seemed endless, filled with waves, sunburnt shoulders, fries and soft-serve ice cream. In the evenings, we cycled through the dunes along crackling shell paths, searching for “racing rabbits,” little groups of rabbits that would dart away the moment we came around a bend.

Life was good. Until we lost our mother to cancer. I was ten, my sister was twelve. For a long time, things became unsettled, at home and beyond.

But when I was nineteen, I unexpectedly found something that gave me direction. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction making little films with my father’s Video8 camera. During a dinner at my sister’s home in Maastricht, I moved like a helicopter up along a table leg, zigzagging between the glasses toward their faces. A friend of my sister, who studied at the art academy, said to me, “Why don’t you do something with images?”

That question set everything in motion.

I started with film and later moved into photography. My village, our dogs, local news, football riots, outsiders and accidents, I photographed everything I could get my hands on. I withdrew socially because I wanted nothing else anymore. Photos photos photos. Freezing the busy world, magical.

My sister’s room became my darkroom, and I paid for the hundreds of rolls of film and prints by flipping burgers as a vegetarian. I never finished photography school, but I kept getting better. In Bruna bookstores, I copied down colophons, picked up the phone, and called art directors with a mix of friendliness and boldness. To my own surprise, with some success.

It was time to move to Amsterdam. That was where the clients were. It was good there, but in the beginning also lonely and poor. To be able to eat, I sold an expensive lens, but I kept practicing and decided to focus on portrait photography. After years of relative solitude, I wanted to meet many different kinds of people.

Shortly after that, I happened to run into someone whose work I didn’t know, but whom I had been friendly to for three years while working a side job in a clothing store. In time, I was able to show him my portfolio, and he gave me the opportunity to photograph for the VARAgids. Almost overnight, well-known people from across the Netherlands were standing in front of my camera every week. I photographed them with large flash setups and brightly colored backgrounds, and I had a fantastic time.

But over the years, I developed an increasing preference for quiet, powerful portraits, without too much fuss. I returned to a way of looking that had also been there in the beginning: looking at what is already there. At shape, structure, lines, and above all natural light. Light that, in all its diversity, has always been right there in front of me. Sometimes grey, sometimes powerful, sometimes bright and fleeting. That is where I move now, together with all those extraordinary people.

At the same time, my eye is increasingly drawn to other things as well. Small things. Landscapes. Everyday scenes. Things you might not notice at first, but that can suddenly take on something strange, atmospheric, and powerful if you look at them long enough. What I search for in faces, I want to find there too. And make visible with the same intensity I seek in my portraits.