Photos are the perfume of life
In November 2022 I told a story in this fine magazine for the first time. That story was about myself, my wanderings and how, as a former desk junkie, I went to try my luck in photography. Something to do with street photography, and a frame still had to be built around it. My book the Straatfotobijbel was in the making. When I had coffee with Roos somewhere at the start of 2023, I asked whether there might be room for a regular column. Alongside drawing and photographing, writing is a hobby I wanted to do more with. We are nearly two years and a dozen and a half columns further on. This is my last.
It is intriguing that a photographer makes images, but that it is never really about those images themselves. Just think about it. Photos are the perfume of life, a casual but well chosen extra. Photos, like perfume, exist to stir an emotion or to tell a story. To let a story come about. Photos stop time, so that you can think about what you have just seen. I know photographers who do not want to share their story, but deliberately choose to leave the story to the viewer. And there are photographers who like to set the story out, without spoon-feeding it, so that a photo can be seen in the context of a time or a place.
Over the past two years I came to appreciate other photographers in styles I used to leaf past without a thought. Photographers such as Nanda Hagenaars, Richard Koek and Jasper Doest, none of whom I even knew by name three years ago. Three years ago, when I had only just picked up my professional camera. I did not know who Stephan Vanfleteren was and only now realise how much I missed there. These days a little endorphin is released when my phone tells me that one of these very different photographers has posted a new update on Instagram. The world has become a different stage, and my way of looking has changed.
Photography has also become a subjective reality check. My photo gives my picture of my reality, stripped of war and sorrow. Your reality is different and it is interesting to see where those worlds meet. Without diminishing or naming the horrors of our time, every photo lets you look on objectively. What you do with it subjectively is up to you.
In 2025 I visited the Zilveren Camera exhibition in the Stevenskerk in Nijmegen and realised the distance between me and the people in the photos. I drowned in the stories, lost myself in Sakir Khader’s tremendous photographs of a terrible war. Our world is limited to what we want to hear and see, and these images pulled me straight into the misery of the world. I do not like the news, it is too confronting, too much negativity and it lands too hard. Perhaps that is the residue of my burnout; I feed on positivity and that is often hard to find in the news these days. These photos put me back on the ground with both feet. Yes, we are allowed to worry, because it is not all unicorns and rainbows.
In the columns for Focus Magazine I shared my brainwaves with you, and somewhere in the Dutch photography landscape I will certainly carry on doing that. I told you about the brake that sits next to the accelerator, and more well meant advice of that kind. I am keenly aware that I wrote most of the columns to myself. That I was really reflecting. That, like you probably, I still have so much to learn and discover in photography. The journey has only just begun.
Thank you, Roos and Jannie, you were a joy to think things through with. Thank you for the platform you offered a motivated photographer and will offer the next columnist. Thank you for the endless passion with which you make this wonderful magazine. Next time we speak it will not be about deadlines and schedules; we will drink our coffee at our leisure. I can hear us laughing. Photography really is fantastic.
This article first appeared in Focus Magazine (the best photography magazine in the Netherlands), for which I wrote a column in every issue in 2023 and 2024.