As I was browsing through my archives, I found this picture of a priest.
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I’d always thought it was good with the nice lighting and all, but I never did anything with it. Besides it was shot on some very grainy film and I never use that anymore so I didn’t think it would fit in any of my series. But still this man in the picture…. He seems detached from his environment and yet so at peace with it. For me it looks like he’s given up the fight but surrenders with dignity. Maybe I’m putting too much into something which isn’t even there or visible for anybody else, after all the man is just standing there, but that for me is part of the beauty of photography. That you can make up your own stories and are free to interpret images any way you like. This is the basis of my work; I want to make “open” pictures which are very realistic in the sense that they are made in the “real world” so to speak, but at the same time contain many different realities for different people. I don’t want to make documentaries even though I use a documentary style in my images. For me it’s not about “documenting” a certain place and the people who live there, added with some still-lives of the things that are supposed to tell us something about that place. Even though I named one of my projects: “VEGAS”, it’s not even about Vegas for me. Life just directed me that way and I found beautiful light and space. It could’ve been anywhere else in the world. So there it is. In a way I want to detach myself from storytelling and giving you all the answers, or like William Eggleston said much better offcourse : “I’m at war with the obvious”. I wouldn’t be able to say it better and it still holds true for my work.