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

You can't see it

Two landscapes. Two places. Both places have a soul. Just like people's souls, you can't see them. Portrait photos are sometimes said to reveal a person's soul. Well, they don't. A soul will not fit on a single photograph.
Can a place have a soul? Yes, I think so. The soul comprises someone's past, present, and someday one's future. You can feel the soul of a place if you contemplate about it's past and it's present, and think about what might be it's future. But you can not see it. You can only think that you see it.



About the photographs:

TOP: The Polish village of Czerna, which was once the German village of Tschirne.
After World war II, the German inhabitants were driven out of their homes and expelled to Germany, to make room for Poles who were driven out of their homes by the Soviets. At the 1945 Potsdam Conference the Allied had decided that Poland had to leave a large territory to the Soviet Union in the East, and gain German territory in the West as compensation. It is estimated that between 0.5 and 3 million ethnic Germans lost their lives during the expulsion.

BOTTOM: The Col de la Schlucht in the Vosges Mountains (France).
After winning the Franco-Prussian War the German Empire annexed the regions of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871. The new border between the two countries followed the heights of the Vosges, and the Schlucht Pass became an important border crossing.
The humiliation of defeat and the loss of territory led to widespread revanchist feelings among the French, which in turn was one of the reasons why France was so eager to go to war in 1914.
At the beginning of the hostilities in 1914, French troops used the Col de la Schlucht and other passes to invade Alsace. Their assault was quickly stopped by the Germans, and the front established a few miles west of the border. The next four years a bloody trench war was fought on the summits of the Vosges Mountains.

Welcome

Welcome to Goos van der Veen's blog.

Goos is a documentary photographer living in The Netherlands. He is particularly interested in the modern landscape (both in his home country as in the rest of the world), but from time to time you may also find him amidst photojournalists covering everyday news. His journalistic work focuses mainly on politics, economy, environment and spatial planning.

As an artist I try to stay as close to reality as I observed it before taking a photo. I will never use filters to create surrealistic effects, nor will I 'repaint' the image in Photoshop.


Here's one of my favorites from 2009:

Parzyce, Poland, 12 August 2009

All photographs ©Goos van der Veen

Please don't steal my work!