Beemster Colours

A few weeks ago I was pointed at the American photographer Todd Hido. Hido is known from pictures that express a sense of being lost, displaced and excluded: images of homes at night with light behind just a single window; apparently random deserted landscapes in the rain from behind a dirty windshield; and models who seem to be left behind in anonymous motel rooms. It’s not just the subject but also the way the pictures are taken that convey that feeling – taken in a vague, grubby and alienating way. I was touched immediately. Not because the feeling resonates as such – although, who occasionally doesn’t feel himself as being a stranger? – but more by the immense tension the images convey so consistently.

Taking his remark seriously on how he learns from empathizing with the work of fellow photographers – “I have noticed within my own practice that adding a genre or another way of taking pictures, often adds an extra layer that complicates things more deeply.” – I chose to follow at least two of his trails (‘Landscapes’ and ‘Houses at Night’) to experience myself how image and imagination relate to each other with me taking the very same subjects. What kind of inner world would then shine through?

Last weekend we finally got the opportunity to make a trip in an everlasting drizzle – a wandering that took us to the Beemster. This earliest industrially reclaimed lake (‘droogmakerij’) in the Netherlands, which unique geometric landscape design is on UNESCO World Heritage Site list, I used to traverse often by bike in the past when I lived closer to it. The classical, symmetric grid of roads, trees, pastries and canals gives something endless to it, but not in a sense that makes you feel lost. Actually it has something very familiar, something that more represents like ‘home’ then as a deserted emptiness like how Hido represents the countryside.

And as a result I got, though taken under pretty similar conditions (from behind a sprinkled windshield), rather different images: water colors – how appropriate for a reclaimed lake in an autumnal rain. Dreamy pictures but with powerfully accentuated colors, in which lines are loosened and colors shift. Quasi the feet on the table and letting your mind go. Images that express more something of exploration than of drifting – where water gets fertile, emptiness space, and space gets home. That picture the tension between structure and creativity, dream and reality. And by doing so get closer to the prime reason why this polder was listed by the UNESCO: “The Beemster Polder is a masterpiece of creative planning, in which the ideals of antiquity and the Renaissance were applied to the design of a reclaimed landscape.”