Spectacular city
12 November

In hindsight, it’s peculiar that I have never tried to get my hands on a copy of this book before. It’s been out of print for years but it never occurred to me to look for it in second-hand bookstores, or perhaps I had just half-forgotten about it. But now that I have a copy on my shelf, I’m more than happy to have it. It’s in a good enough condition, and since it’s a thing from the past, my past, it feels inappropriate to have a brand new one anyway .

I remember the exhibition that the book accompanied, Spectacular City. Photographing the Future (2006), as the one that ignited my interest in photography as a contemporary art form. The photographs by Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Todd Hido, Francesco Jodice, Sze Tsung Leong, Bas Princen, Geert Goiris, Frank van der Salm, Aglaia Konrad and others made a huge impression, but I don’t think I immediately recognised the importance of my encounter with their work. It’s not that they instantly made me pick up a camera and start photographing architecture and cityscapes, that only happened some six years later. And I obviously didn’t buy the catalogue, even though the exhibit was held at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, where I worked, and the book was published by their affiliated publisher. It wouldn’t have been too hard to get myself a copy.

In his essay, Steven Jacobs talks about the way urban landscape photography evolved over time, from street photography and the use of public space, to a focus on the structure of the city itself. 

In the 1970s, the photographers featured in the New Topographics exhibition introduced a new way of photographing landscapes transformed by human activity. They elevated the everyday, anonymous and often overlooked landscape to the status of a serious photographic subject. They created a new aesthetic centred on detachment, observation, and formal analysis.

The photographers of Spectacular City build on these achievements while adding a new dimension. They focus on the contemporary metropolis and its complex spatial structures and patterns, exploring its visual, aesthetic, and sometimes futuristic possibilities, developing new ways of perceiving and representing urbanity. Curator Emiliano Gandolfi even suggests that these photographs could be understood as design proposals for architects and urban planners. Not as concrete building plans, but visual proposals that feed the debate over urban planning.

Six from a recent walk. Rotterdam, November 2026. All Nikon Z6.

SoZa
17 April 2026

Former Ministry of Social Affairs, The Hague, 1980-1990. Architecture by Herman Hertzberger.

This building, a striking example of Dutch structuralism, will be demolished later this year. I won’t use the word beautiful, but it is an important piece of architectural heritage, it has character, and I will be sad to see it go down. 

Something to emerge
26 March 2026

“Sometimes nothing stands out, nothing feels worth capturing. In those moments, the instinct is to wait – to hold off until something meaningful appears. But the opposite tends to be true. Begin anyway. Photograph without expectation. Even the things that don’t seem to matter. Because once the process starts, perception shifts. More becomes visible. Moments begin to reveal themselves. As if the act itself creates the conditions for something to emerge.”

I more or less tried that with this latest roll of film. To ‘begin anyway’. Despite the lack of ideas, and almost resenting the whole endeavour. The looking but not seeing anything. The ugliness of this city. Not that I have anything against ugliness in itself, but I do take issue with the ugliness that surrounds me every day. Using film for an exercise like this might seem odd. A rather expensive choice for something that felt doomed from the outset. But I needed the unpredictability of film. I wouldn’t have managed to get myself out onto the street with the Nikon; better to throw some money at the problem.

But did I get what I was promised?

At the very least, I experienced that almost childlike pleasure of unpacking the scans. But other than that, not really. Which doesn’t surprise me, since I took one or two pictures per week or so. Meaning that there was no ‘process’ to speak of, let alone something emerging from it. But even so. If you recognize something as half-failed—technically or otherwise—you also see that it half-succeeded. If your expectations are low, you either prove yourself wrong (oh but hey, that’s actually quite nice), or right, a win either way.

Some of the photos give me the feeling that I photographed Rotterdam in the early 1990s, when the city was ugly in a much nicer way, raw and undeveloped, purely down to the visual qualities of this film and how I exposed it. The tones, the low contrast and the grain, in combination with the subject. At the same time, I found myself thinking that I should go back to a proper black-and-white film—as opposed to the Ilford XP2 which is processed in C41 chemicals for colour film. And then I discovered a new lab within cycling distance, one I’d like to try next time because I like their concept and they seem to do good work, including proper b/w processing, which my current lab doesn’t offer. That’s what it got me. A feeling of ‘next time’. Which is more than I expected.

Olympus OM-1 35mm with Ilford XP2. Quote stolen from Noice magazine. 

Hospital
02 February 2026

Home, last summer. If anyone had suggested I ‘think of a happy place’, this would be it. Olympus OM-1, Kodak Portra 400

I remember almost every detail from that day at the hospital, but what I find myself thinking about most often is the gap in between—the episode that I have no knowledge of. I remember being transferred to the OR, a room that looked like the command centre of a spaceship, or a data centre in the middle of moving house. Impressive, and slightly intimidating. I climbed onto the operating table, half naked, where they placed warm and cold patches on my body, a nose mask over my face for oxygen, and positioned me exactly right so that the vital inner parts of my body would be visible on a monitor at my feet. All very efficient and routine. One of the doctors made small talk with me. In hindsight, I would have preferred to properly take in everything that happened in that room, but at that very moment, I appreciated the distraction.

As soon as the anaesthetics kicked in I was gone, only to wake up a few hours later in the recovery room. What happened in between, I don’t know. It’s the silly details I wonder about, not so much the operation itself—a fairly abstract procedure. If I could have watched it, I would have been looking at a screen. I probably wouldn’t have been able to mentally connect the visuals with my own flesh and bones.

It feels much stranger imagining how they painted my lower body parts with a disinfecting liquid that left an aggressive pink on my skin, in a better-safe-than-sorry kind of way. How they put a knife in my groin and shoved a tube into my vein, a rather intimate act I would say. What would they have said to each other? What would my face have looked like? Like I was sleeping? Or dead? How many of them were needed to get me back into bed? Two? Four? Would my limbs at least have cooperated a little? Somehow, they managed to make me presentable again. Or human, perhaps. Released my hair from the silly cap, rearranged my hospital jacket, tucked me in. It still feels a little absurd to think about these things.

Commuting
07 December 2025

This may very well be my ultimate dream scenario: to temporarily disappear to get my act together, clean out my closets, tackle this ‘paper’work nightmare, trade escapism for discipline, practice, practice, practice, and resurface with a magnificent series of photographs.