In my garden
31 July 2024
I was working on a text for the forthcoming exhibition Garden Futures, and before I knew it, I found myself browsing The Photographer in the Garden.

I took photos of the institute’s outdoor space in 2015, when the first edition of The New Garden was being laid out. They are not very good, basically because I was trying to make pictures that would work as pairs, and they didn’t. Or perhaps some did, but as a concept, it tanked. I made a lot more photos than I was asked to or could ever use, but they never quite succeed in properly documenting the process. Almost ten years after, they feel somewhat outdated, I’d like to think that I would do it differently today (but I dare to wonder). In any case, I figured they deserved a new edit.  

Here is a Belgian film I saw a couple of weeks ago. Not about gardens, but about looking, and paying attention. It wasn’t the mosses, made up of thousands of individual little plants and flowers that got the message across, but the city of Brussels, its green outskirts, the warm summer night glow and long walks. A particular shot of an overgrown, broken fence. A building under construction with cranes slowly moving in a dusky sky. Imaginary photographs.  
Back to my text.

Derek Jarman, filmmaker and gardener, is part of Garden Futures. I look up Howard Sooley’s photos of Prospect cottage, and find Dungeness on Street View. It makes me think of The Garden from 1991 and its soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner. I search for lyrics, play the soundtrack. A bit overwhelming, not the music, but the feeling. Jarman is my first published film review (Blue), is going to London on my own and see Jubilee in a movie theatre that used to be a railway station. Or a church, I can’t remember. Is a rattling projector in a cramped booth. Is driving to Poland in a dodgy car. I un-forget how I took stills of The Garden and other art films from playing VHS tapes. They are probably in a box of slides somewhere not far from where my feet are. I resist the urge to crawl under my desk.

I’m not a gardener, and I rarely photograph plants or flowers unless I’m asked to. I look at gardens as landscapes. Or architecture. Eyes on the horizon. This is the last photo I took of The New Garden in its original lay out, a year or so before it was razed to the ground.

Tour
20 June 2024









Art tour in Boijmans’ old museum building, which has been ‘under renovation’ since 2019, and will be for another decade or so. I can’t say I’ve missed it much since it closed its doors, or perhaps I have, but wasn’t aware of it. Now I am. No specific, strong memories, just a sense of familiarity and homecoming, and thinking what a mighty fine building this is for looking at art.

Wired
27 April 2024
I've been thinking about introversion lately, prompted by some reading I've done online. Nothing eye-opening, as I'm obviously familiar with the subject. And yet I felt that everything in my life seemed to come closer together from this perspective. From my relationships with people to leaving journalism school, from the development of my non-existent career to the way I go about my daily life, and what I need from it. There is a kind of beauty in the consistency with which every aspect can be traced back to the way the introverted brain works and how it’s wired.

Unrelated: The first interior shots with the 24mm. Olympus OM-1 + Kodak Ultramax 400. The Sonneveld interior is a sort of testing ground for me to try and compare new film rolls, lenses and whatnot. 

Entity
29 February 2024

Only now do I feel that the person I’ve been talking to and confiding in for over a decade, and the person who occasionally sits next to me on a rock, have fully merged into one solid entity/identity.

Until, I suppose, we eventually relapse into our ones and zeros personas.

Around Bergen, Norway, 26 February 2024.


Counterbalance
21 October, 2023




Scotland, 2023. Kodak Portra 400. Some more film photos here
It's not unreasonable to assume that 2023 won't go down as my most productive or inspired year ever. On the other hand, fiddling with rolls of film and a 50-year-old camera is easily the best thing I've done in a long time. Not because it makes me take better pictures, because it doesn’t. What I appreciate most is the unpredictability of the results (which says enough about my poor mastery of the equipment). The counterbalance to disappointment is the surprise I rarely feel anymore with digital. What the light does to the colours, a kind of softness in the greens, the hues of a reflection or a shadow, a distance to reality as I perceived it. 

In Scotland I have been a little sloppy at times, being used, perhaps, to the indulgence of digital raw files. Taking a photo with the film camera requires more concentration and time than I seem to have allowed myself.  The number of shots is limited, it has a prime lens, depth of field is more of an issue (the Z6 files are pretty much in focus everywhere, even if you don’t want them to be), and of course focusing is manual. So yes, some of them are genuinely awkward. It's not that I cherish these flaws out of some misplaced sense of nostalgia or because operating this camera sometimes feels like playing with a toy camera. No, they make me want to do better – and still be surprised.