Erschüttert
2008-2009
Sudden change and loss.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and soon afterwards East and West Germany were reunited.
It became clear that nothing would remain the same in the former German Democratic Republic.
One of the major changes was that the Soviets were ordered to leave all their military bases in Germany. Major parts of these areas were meant to become Naturschutzgebiet (nature reserves).
I visited one of the former training grounds in 2003, interested in finding out what it would look like: nature reclaiming its lost territories. I was struck by the total undoing of the former meaning of these places.
When depoliticised and brought back to a human scale there emerged a deep feeling of loss, maybe even personal loss.
While working on this project, mostly in 2008, I focused on expression, rather than on description. My goal was to produce autonomous images, located on these former Soviet military areas but not dictated by them. Superimposing my theme of change and loss onto the locations, I managed to resist the picturesque call of the decay, so characteristic of these abondoned terrains and came home with a series of highly distinct photographs that speak of the instability of our certainties.
APAD, A Picture All Days
2007-2008
APAD is a project I started in the end of May 2007 with the intention to reflect on my photography. I wanted to get free of the formalistic approach I had developed by thinking ‘in series’ and in working with a rather demanding 4x5” field camera.
The concept was simple: I had to make one good picture every day and should not worry about fitting every new picture in with the previous ones.
In the course of this project, my photography became more expressive, it lost a serious amount of its descriptive sharpness and since then (again) wanders easily through various photographic genres.
A selection of these pictures, called The Best Days was presented in a self-published book in 2008. It was surprisingly easy to make a coherent, meaningful presentation out of all these rather different pictures. The small dimensions of the book (18x18 cm) may certainly have played a role in this succes. On the other hand: I am sure that experiencing such a diverging set of pictures as being interconnected is mainly caused by the allowance not to think to ‘big’ about it.
That’s exactly what working on this project has changed in my photography.
Publication:
A Picture All Days, the best days
Self-published through Blurb, 2008
Exhibition:
Amsterdam Centrum voor Fotografie