On travel

Last weekend I and a few photo friends from Fotogroep Haarlem were guest of our sisterclub in Osnabrück, Germany. Between all the activities we had an hour to spend on photographing at a shunting-yard with old trains near the Pies Mountain. And being there you can choose many different points of view - of course without having had the opportunity to prepare yourself up-front, thinking about it. Still, after walking back and forth with the camera in your hand, you feel a 'story' emerging.

I got an association with ghost ships or space vessels that apparently are abandoned, but, after you climb onto one, suddenly sets in motion - steered by the invisible hand of an unknown life form that captures you to an obscure destination. Windows seem to invite you to take a look if you can detect the secret driver. Windows which reflections seem to mask what is behind it - or on the contrary, contain a clue about the destination. You start to feel the tension, and the curiosity where this might lead you. You look for more clues. Kneel down to see the switches and tracks, follow them to the next curve. You feel as if you are about to draw an important switch in your own course of life - beyond which there is no return.

In short, I felt reality shifting - felt the essence of what I want to achieve in photography: to experience reality beyond the visible, to capture it and to convey that shift to the observer too. Doesn't my photography want to be that ghost train that abducts the visitor - but possibly even more myself - to another, more-true reality behind what we can see?

Image and Language

I just put new photos, taken in Norway and Denmark, online on my website under the album name Trollheim - House of the Trolls. Please take a look. 

As I already described in my previous blog post, it wasn’t easy to find my photographic way in so much landscape, so much ‘emptiness and plainness’. Nevertheless, with hindsight, I am rather satisfied anyway – apparently I still was able to get my arms around it, I think - as this picture from the fjord at Odda might prove:

Usually you only know afterwards. In my experience, the development of photos happens in three steps. First while taking the picture. Things catch my eye, I make my choices, my composition – and usually that is done rather unconsciously, on automatic pilot. What did catch my eye, what my choices were, that is what I usually realize afterwards – at the moment itself I just feel an urge to press the release button.

The secondary process of re-discovery starts behind the computer, during post-processing, when I play with contrast and color, explore the possibilities (and meaning) of the image. Then things start to get their place – I get to see what moved me to take the picture, recognize the intent I (might) have (had) and bring that to the surface.

The third phase is when I oversee all of my selected and processed images and try to order them for placement on my website. They need to convey a common story together. Then the third instrument comes in: ‘beeldspraak’ (Dutch for: talking in metaphors, figurative language). People say often: "an image can tell more than a thousand words" – but I don’t agree on that. Language can be very figurative, and storytelling using figurative language can very well create its own images that are at least as powerful as the ‘beeldtaal’ (image-language) of the pictures.

Language gives context, enables to link, associate, and to put things in context. That is why I link on my website images with language – a language that besides conveying cognitive meaning (nouns) appeal on imagination by means of sound (e.g., alliteration) and figurative or physical associations. For example, in this latest album Trollheim I use images and sounds from Norwegian (mingling Dutch and Norsk to a kind of ‘Neersk’) and Norwegian mythology (the Edda) to ‘taste’ the images and (in the first place for myself) to give them context – which is also a kind of post-processing I wouldn’t want to miss.

Vice versa, this helps me to shift the emphasis in my post-processing where needed – and further back: to sharpen my unconsciousness to see things better next time, to better associate and capture better pictures.

I know, mixing words and images is rather controversial amongst photographers - but what do you think?

Trollheim

This holiday – we just returned last week – we traveled during three weeks through Norway. Beautiful country, breathtaking landscapes (Rondane, Dovrefjell, Jotunheimen, Hardangervidda en Ryfylkeheiene)! – an El Dorado for photographers. You would say. I had great difficulty with it.

How for God's sake do you make a picture that is as smashing as what you see in front of you? How simple isn't it then to fail, to just make a poor rendering, a travel guide illustration that doesn't give more than an impression, an encouragement to go there yourself? A doubtfulness that roots in the pleasure I had in the projects I did earlier this and last year, like citiZen and working with infrared, in which I layered a different way of seeing over 'reality' - which in the case of landscapes is just ‘a hell of a job’.

In the end I returned home with lots of these travel guide pictures and actually pretty neat ones too - but making them gave me hardly the fun that I tasted before. And so it became a struggle for me, though a learning experience too. I felt more than before that - at least for me - the challenge is not to capture what I see in the most beautiful way. It is my challenge to create an image that establishes a world in its own right that moves the imagination of the viewer

Luckily I achieved that a few times, I think - to layer my story over the landscape and to add a dimension to it. By choosing another perspective, making use of counter-light and strange weather conditions, and in post-processing for example by manipulating more explicitly the colors .

Two examples:

This image shows the fascinating landscape of Rondane - barren, deserted, covered with lichen as far as the eye reaches, with heavy clouds and drizzle You feel yourself laying on your belly, cold and left alone.

Hydro-power in one go: primary, energy, life giving - you feel it. Taking surprisingly at the side of the Trollstigen road.

In short, I need to reinvent my landscape photography (along these lines) - or quit with it. Difficult but I must - because landscape photography gives a lot of joy, not in the least because it gives me another reason to go out. The key? To experience the landscape even deeper and to capture it from within my emotion and my inner image – and to leave the travel guide-bias and photo competitions etc. for what they are. Recognizable?

Zonnestraal

Sunday - under an ever changing partially clouded sky - I went out taking pictures together with my photo-friend Nanda at Landgoed Zonnestraal (Sunbeam Estate) near Hilversum. The buildings, constructed in 1928 as sanatorium, establish the first example of concrete skeleton construction in the Netherlands, characterized by the enormous lightness of the architecture and experience, intended to let in sunlight as much as possible for the healing of tuberculosis patients.

As a photographer you must do something with this theme, this focus on light as therapy. So we experimented both with infrared and with double exposure. In the latter technique the same (digital) negative is exposed twice (or multiple times) in which two images are merged over each other in camera. Merely as in the old time you forgot to transport your film. Well, it was the first time I experimented with this and I quite puts a stress on your imagination, but I will certainly work with thing more often.

Take for example this image of the sight axis of the main building. It is comprised of two exposures, the first with a focus on the delicate rocket (regretfully not flowering anymore), the second with a focus on the building. The result required some post-processing - in particular making the overall image more bright - but the result displays a magical lightness, conveys the idea: 'there I will find healing'.

But also Nanda had to face up to it. I took two double exposure pictures of her just as a test, and I believe this one is the nicest of the two because of its composition of lines and the soft colors. Pay also attention to the subtle sky on the upper left reflected in the glass. Her smile prevents the impression of here being imprisoned behind glass - gives more the feeling of being healed.

Return of the citiZen

Last weekend I returned to the inner city of Amsterdam and to my mission of 'taking another few citiZen'. With the latter I mean a special kind of city photography, inspired by Saul Leiter, in which city images are captured in an intuitive, abstracting and esthetically way, in which alienation, reflections and multi-layering are important style elements. See for example also my earlier series citiZen and symphoNY on my website. And then now for the first time in Summer - meaning different light and more color! Evidently I had to get into it again - which was not easy. Nevertheless I returned with some nice pictures, like a portrait of this man, framed twice in multiple squares and surrounded by colors ands fellow citizens.

After lonely 'tigering around' for over three hours it was good to have a nice cup of coffee with my photo-friend Hester - accomplice in crime - in Café De Waag where our citiZen adventure started at the beginning of this year. We then moved on visit the EYE, the hyper-modern film museum across the IJ. Splendid building, perfectly apt to mixing Leiterian and good old-fashioned architecture photography. So, what to think of this peek through?

Within a colorful almost Mondrian frame we see two people, having a conversation at the water side, who, if you peek through your eyelashes, reduce to two (living) points that thanks to their sharpness immediately draw your attention. In both images I played locally with the vibrancy of the colors using hints of CEP3 Film Effects Fuji Superia 200.

Oradour-sur-Glâne

During our short break in June in the Corrèze region in France we visited the martyr village of Oradour-sur-Glâne. Martyr village as this once bustling village was massacred and burnt down by the German SS in June 1944. It was impressive to walk through the streets, between the burnt houses, looking through the open doors and windows and to imagine how the last hours of its inhabitants must have been.

I wanted to convey some of the oppression and dreadfulness with the images we took here. The low viewpoint and the hash contrast with which the pictures were converted in black & white conversion as well as adding grain in post-processing (all with Capture NX2 with CEP3) eliminate all that remembers of the nice summer weather - and make the images to an outcry against barbarity.