Contact
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Artist statement
“Photography as a way to build one’s own world around what is absent, elusive, or left behind.”
As a child, I would wander for hours through fields and forests. I built huts out of branches and found materials, in places that were just for me. As soon as my hut was finished, I would retreat inside to watch, wait, and disappear. Outside, I found something I couldn’t always find at home or in the village: comfort, freedom, and the sense that I could be myself. That’s how I built my own world.
Now that I’m older, what I remember most is wandering through a familiar landscape, paying attention to what lies on the margins: an abandoned building, the edge of a forest, a field, or an object that seems to have become detached from its surroundings. That way of seeing still lies at the heart of my photography.
The landscape holds the memory of my heritage, and I encounter memories as I wander through it. Sometimes something presents itself from which an image slowly emerges that finds its way into a photograph. More often, I collect photos that move me along the way without my immediately understanding why. Only when I put them together do they begin to converse with one another. Then I listen attentively to what unfolds between the images.
People are absent from many of my images. Yet they have never completely disappeared. Their presence remains palpable in what they have left behind. Sometimes it is someone who was once there, or someone who might have been there. What is missing is often just as important as what is visible. Not as a subject, but as something that influences the way I look, search, and photograph.
Just as I used to build my huts, I now use photography to shape my own world. The materials have changed, but the urge to build remains. My images invite you to take a closer look at what cannot be immediately explained—at traces, edges, abandoned places, and silences in the landscape. In this way, I create space for what remains elusive or absent: what appears and then disappears, what lingers, and what, despite everything, seems to be out of reach.
Education
2025 - Photobook workshop - Berlin
2024 - Trespasser Photobook Workshop (with Bryan Schutmaat and Matthew Genitempo) in Berlin
2024 - Workshop location-/landscape photography - FotoAcademie Amsterdam
2019 - 2023 Education: Academy FORUM Beeldtaal, Visual Story telling
2019 - Workshop Photo Journalism & Street Photography - London
2018 - 2019 - Masterclass “Intuitive photography” Eli Dijkers