As a Dutchman, you don't think about it, but of course it is extraordinary that you are a few metres below sea level when you stand on a straight road in the polder. That the fields around you have been here for four hundred years after the lake was drained by the windmills you also still see. A flat landscape bordered by the dike behind which, a few metres higher than where you stand, lies the ring canal into which the excess water has been pumped away. It is a landscape that only slowly makes itself known. The small differences, the farms, the different crops during the different seasons and the winter barrenness. Here, the field has recently been ploughed and sown waiting for the warmer weather of spring. The trees on the embankment are already budding but not yet in leaf. Above them, the ever-changing sky. The Dutch cloudscapes in the Dutch light. A landscape that always seems the same but never is. It is a place I regularly return to and cycle down the long open straight polder roads. Only with little wind, though.
My great loves are the water and everything about it. Ships, travel, history and photography. The combination is therefore very common in my photographic work. Most photographs are created intuitively. It is an image that strikes me, usually a combination of form and color in which a.. Read more…