submission

What touches me and what makes me move...... In my early childhood I was already fascinated by looking and watching things around me. I realized the uniqueness of what I saw and captured faces, expressions, motions, differences... So working on this ‘playground‘ and collecting impressions became a passion. There are three photographers I especially like to refer: the dutch Sanne Sannes, Edward Weston and Man Ray. With Sannes, I would say, I feel a kind of congeniality for this ‘agent provocateur‘, with his intimate portraits of women as well as for his breaking rules and making experiments with traditions and styles. Weston and Ray are artists I admire: the first for his formal brilliance and making „the common place unusual“ (EW), the second above all for his ‘Rayography’. The pictures: The pictures 1- 4 belong to a greater serie of women’s portraits I did in the years seventy to eighty. They may already show, how much my focus goes to the light, its intensity, its place, its colour.....Light is my primary “toy“ on this playground and what I call my intuition is nothing less than the analogy between the realization and the exposure to light. Looking at the different grades of light, picture 4 has the most “white“, having caught this really unique light of the “Friese Wad“. Therefore it’s an ‘hommage‘ to Friesland, the place I was born - but it’s also an hommage to this never ending love affair photographers have with light. Picture 5, belonging to a smaller selection and published in a limited edition, goes a step further and could be taken as a transition to more abstraction. In a technical sense it means going from analog to digital processing. The result of this process are the pictures 6 to 10: What you see is not what you are used to see looking at the photography of someone or somebody – it’s a kind of irritation and could even remind of Man Ray, who said, that he would paint if something couldn’t be photographed. Meanwhile, more than half a century later, what looks like a painting is still a photography, but we talk about the digital picture as „the photography after the photography“. The ‘story’ of its production is totally different, but the conventions we look at it are the same. What happens when the object or the model in front of the camera is gone, is the real creative process: The ‘old‘ picture, the search for a motive, now forms only the basis for new proceedings. The new “art“ means to avoid something, to reach something, to add, to take away.... always considering the rhythm, the “cadence“ of light and shadow. The result is something new: it’s no longer the picture of somebody or something, it’s a digital construction and a simulation of a photography. In this sense, the experimentations done in this field as a photographer, could decide artistic quality or not.