Sometimes

Sometimes, when I look with clear eyes, everything seems to fall into place in front of me and all I have to do is press a button to take the photograph, and steal the image from reality and bring it to my home, where I print it on paper in a way the ink is spread across the paper in a balanced and pleasing way, and then, when I look at the image on the paper, what I see is not what I saw, but instead a new little universe that has so many things in it, big and small, little things that if you were a painter you would never have thought to put them in your painting, the little things that turn a scene into reality, a reality that can bear no name, because it is what it is, a reality, made of ink on paper.

The skiable landscape

A few weeks ago, I finished the photography part of my new documentary series The Skiable Landscape.
Here is a small selection of the photographs; a larger selection can be found here.

I’m not a skier. I live in a low, flat country. So far I had been in the mountains only during summer holidays. Of course I had seen pictures of mountains in wintertime, mostly in advertisements for ski holidays. These images usually presented small groups of skiers sliding through a peaceful winter wonderland, or enjoying a luxury life in a picturesque chalet, covered with a thick layer of snow.
I never felt really attracted to this, partly because I'm not very sportive (and probably also too lazy to learn to ski), and partly because winter has never been my favorite season anyway.

My first visit to the mountains in wintertime had nothing to do with winter sports; I just came to visit friends who had settled in the French Alps. More visits followed and it became unavoidable that one day I would find myself standing on the front de neige of a French ski resort, amidst cheerful skiers and noisy ski lifts.

From this first visit on I was - and still am - astonished by the industrial scale of what is supposed to be a leisure activity: the machinery that is needed to get all these people up and the ant-like crawling of the skiers coming down the slopes, entire cities being built to house, feed and entertain them, and all this in a spectacular winter wonderland setting. What also struck me is the strange mix of careful planning and architectural wild-west: some resorts are beautifully designed to fit in their natural surroundings, while others are nothing more than a clutter of chalet-style buildings that, notwithstanding their so-called traditional architecture, have no relationship with the original landscape at all.
It also made me wonder how all this would look in summer, when all the tourists are gone and only the infrastructure is left behind, bereft of its purpose.

There is, and always has been, a lot of debate about the good and the bad sides of this mass tourism, about the burden that it is laying on the previously sparsely inhabited mountain areas versus the prosperity it brought to the region. It can not be denied that skiing is a great pleasure for so many people, and allows them to break away from everyday worries. Nor can it be denied that the rise of the winter sports tourism gave the region's economy, that was severely lagging behind in the post-war years, a tremendous boost. But it can also not be denied that the infrastructure needed for this mass tourism hurts the delicate ecology and the landscape of the mountains, and that the change from agriculture to commercial service industry has almost inevitably affected or even destroyed many of the traditions that existed among the people who lived there.

I have a strong stance, that, as a photographer, I have to be humble. These are complex dilemma's, and I am not in the position to decide what is wrong or what is right. I can only observe, with a distant - albeit personal - view, and show the things that have struck me. It is the photographer's gift, and maybe therefore his task, to intensify views, and thus feed people's thinking, and keep the debates alive.

With all this in mind I traveled through the French Alps for five separate weeks, in the winters from January 2010 till January 2012, and in the summer of 2010. My focus was the landscape, and how it was affected by the ski tourist industry. My vantage point was the idealistic views presented by the advertising photographs; the result is simply what I found, with all its beauty and with all its ugliness.

I chose to mention my series The Skiable Landscape, as it has been the ability to be skied upon that has been decisive for the fate of so many mountain areas.

Cowards

Are cows cowards? Looking at this photo one can at least say some are more cowardly than others. Or some are more courageous than others, if you prefer.

Let me say something in favor of them. When I arrived, they were grazing at quite a distance from me. As they saw me, they hesitated a moment, but quickly decided I was not the kind of predator that eats live cows, and, driven by curiosity, started running towards the gate where I was standing. When they were close enough to satisfy their curiosity, they stopped.

Has curiosity ever killed a cow? Possibly, but they are not the kind of animals that prefer a life full of endeavors and dangers, as cats do. They are on earth for a simple task: to eat and to digest, to produce as much milk and/or meat as they can. They are here to serve. A little break to satisfy their curiosity once a day they hardly allow themselves.

The cows behind the two in the front aren't cowards. They are a bit embarrassed, staring at a photographer while they feel they should be at work. That's why they're hiding themselves.
Well, we won't tell anyone, will we? Promise!




(Photographed in the Welzingepolder in Zeeland (NL) on June 20, 2011)


Photo available at Hollandse Hoogte

A dance III

About a month ago, I was on my way from home to a meeting in Amsterdam. I had decided to walk from the station to my meeting, knowing that a demonstration against nuclear energy was held on Dam Square, in the middle of the city, which I wanted to give a quick look.
When I arrived the speakers had already spoken, and now there was music coming from the podium. There was a serene atmosphere, completely unlike the militant rallies against nuclear power that were held in the eighties, the years between Harrisburg and Chernobyl. After Chernobyl, the reservations about nuclear energy became much more common, and the active movement more or less dissolved into the communis opinio. But the climate debate came, and slowly nuclear power became fashionable again. And then a wave overran the Fukushima reactors, and created a momentum for a new movement.

I don't know the cause of the serenity. It may have been the music, or a feeling of homecoming after so many years. My agenda left me no time to investigate.
But in the middle of this serenity was this woman, dancing slowly. Everytime I see this photo I feel jealous of her. Dancing slowly in the middle of a crowd, in the middle of the city - I don't think I could ever do that. But look at her eyes. She seems perfectly happy. I would love to stay there, come home, maybe even dance.
But I had my agenda.



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(More pictures of the demonstration here, at the blog of my friend and colleague Michiel Wijnbergh, who had a different agenda)

A dance II

A few weeks ago I photographed a military exercise in Dokkum, a beautiful town in Fryslân. At the end of the day a company of young marines had to storm a builders' yard occupied by 'insurgents'. There I came across this young dancer.

The yellow stop on the barrel of his Diemaco C7 assault rifle indicates the thing can only shoot blanks now. The expression on this young marine's face indicates he is loving his job. As an 'insurgent' he is allowed to frolic around instead of being a disciplined soldier. 

If it were all for real, this dance would probably not have looked so elegant. Or there would be 5 dead marines by now. And one photographer.

What men want...

Last month at the bi-annual Amsterdam AutoRAI car show:

What do men want? Big trunks...

A dance

The bare facts about this photo:

We are on the tarmac of Eindhoven Airbase in The Netherlands.

We are looking into the hull of a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III military transport aircraft, a plane that is capable of performing both strategic and tactical airlift operations. It can transport a payload of 170,900 lb or 77,500 kg over a distance of 2400 nautical miles or 4400 kilometers without refueling.
The C-17 is operated by Strategic Airlift Capability (SAC), a multinational organization consisting of several NATO members plus Sweden and Finland, to provide for heavy airlift capability that should otherwise be out of reach for these smaller countries.

The white trails on the tarmac are made by a 55.3 tons (121,914 lb) heavy, self-propelled armored howitzer, type PzH 2000, that just drove off the ramp out of the C-17. This heavy artillery piece can deliver 10 high explosive 155mm shells per minute as far as 40 kilometers away. It can even perform Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact, which means it can quickly fire five rounds with different amounts of propellant, at a different angle, so that they will all arrive at the same target at the same time. How about that.
The howitzer was brought back from Afghanistan, and was the last piece of heavy equipment coming home after the redeployment (= withdrawal) of the Dutch forces in the Afghan province of Uruzgan.

These are the bare facts about this photo, and thank you, Wikipedia.

What we are looking at has, however, nothing to do with all this.
We are looking at a dance. The kind of dance that only last a second or so. The kind of dance that even the dancers themselves are not aware of. The kind of dance only photography can reveal. How about that!



Photo @ Hollandse Hoogte