For ten years I photographed on assignment. Fashion, interiors, architecture — and in recent years mostly corporate photography for Rijk Zwaan, travelling the world to document vegetable seed production. Fly on the wall, observing rather than directing. I love that work. But at some point it became clear it wasn't enough.
The limits of a brief
With commercial work, beauty is always already defined before I pick up the camera. A client wants a certain feeling, a certain message, a certain result. That's not a complaint — it's simply how assignment photography works, and I got good at it. But it left little room for the question that occupies me most: what do I find beautiful, even when nobody's asking?
After my education at the AKI in Enschede, I realised early on that to keep breathing I needed to keep making work alongside the commercial assignments, without the frame of a brief. No brief, no client telling me what beauty should look like.
2016 — the moment it came together
The shift only really took shape with a single white tulip on my table in 2016. I didn't photograph that flower to deliver a message or satisfy a client. I photographed it because I saw something I had to capture — for myself. That's the difference in one sentence: commercial work answers someone else's question; fine art work asks my own.
Every photo in the Wilting series is the result of a search for beauty in the non-beauty — without anyone having asked me to look for it.
What I carried over from the commercial world
The shift wasn't a break from my commercial background — more a different application of it. The compositional discipline I learned in fashion and architecture photography is still in every Wilting photograph. The fly-on-the-wall eye I developed at Rijk Zwaan — observing rather than staging — is exactly how I approach a wilting flower: I direct nothing, I register what's already there.
Travelling for work also brought me into contact with cultures, especially across Asia, where transience is seen differently than it is here. That has permanently changed how I look at decay.
Why I keep doing both
I'm still a corporate photographer. That work pays the bills, takes me to places I'd never otherwise see, and keeps my technical skills sharp. But my fine art work is where I keep finding myself — where, without a brief, I get to explore what actually occupies me: is beauty more beautiful than the transience of beauty?
I still don't answer that question in words. I answer it with every photograph I make.