Fine Art nominee

We live in an unprecedented era. More people roam our planet than ever before. Our world's resources are pushed to exhaustion. Yet the earth and its inhabitants are astonishing; their behavior, ways of expression and diversity breath-taking. Life is a play unfolding, it never becomes tedious to just watch it go by.

Somewhere between my eleventh and twelfth birthday, my safe world collided. I suddenly found myself entangled in a past, a family history that was - until then - unknown to me. With that came massive doubt in my skills on how to perceive and judge the world I was living in. I resigned into my own little world, like a clamp in its shell, trying to understand the people around me.

Years later now, with trust regained, I rely on my strong capacity to observe - gathered during my youth. The main subject of my photography is humanity as I perceive it. Coming close to my subjects, yet remaining an observer, I capture the world. A world in which light and darkness co-exist side by side.

My photographic work is intuitive, raw, yet very connected and always about people. I graduated the academy of photography with my personal interpretation of the city of Rotterdam entitled ‘Temporal Existence’. Last year I was one of the 12 photographers asked to document the city of Rotterdam. I am author of the self-published photo book ‘Enigma’; a confronting series of images about daily life in India. My work has been exhibited at various places in the Netherlands, including in the Dutch museum of photography and at a satellite exhibition of Noorderlicht. In contests I have won the second price in the Festival d’Images in Toulouse, an European photo contest. In addition, I was selected for the ‘bondsmeesterklasse’ of the Dutch Photography Union, fourfold finalist in the international ‘shoot the face’ award, Spider Awards nominee and Blue Diamond Photo Award nominee. Finally I was one of the 25 FOAM Photo Town photographers and selected as one of the GUP New Dutch Photography talents of 2014. In addition I was also allowed to participate in a Magnum workshop given by Jacob Aue Sobol at Copenhagen. A selection of the work produced during this workshop was exhibited at the Copenhagen Photofestival.