I suppose that the light could be an essential element for creating a photographic image. The scope of photography has expanded; it doesn’t need a subject anymore. It is becoming a media which can exist without storage medium.

The only rule is that you have to use some sort of light. It is definitely true that light is the most important element in photography – whether or not you are shooting in a studio. The light itself doesn’t always have to be the subject of your photographs. But whatever I shoot, I always find that the control of lighting has a significant effect on the outcome of images.

This project has started with an interesting request to create portraits of various bronze statues all over the Netherlands. The majority of the models of these statues are already dead. They were human beings when they were alive, but now they exist as objects. This is where I find a contradiction in the concept of the project. After research, I came to a conclusion that by overwrapping two layers – one is the personification of statues by adopting portrait lighting techniques used in studio setting and the other is the recording of the statues by carving them out again with light much like making a sculpture – I can transform these simple bronze statues you find on street corners into photographs with a raison d'être, a little deeper than what we normally see in them.

I encountered some technical problems during the photoshoot. In the end, I didn’t use one-shot mode; I got close to the statues holding the flash in one hand and shot them using multi-shot mode to carve them out again. The final images were digitally composed in post-production. As a by-product, I have got a large number of material cuts. This series is a spin-off of the project; I recycled the material cuts to create animated GIFs.

In a moment when the headlight from a car shine through the darkness of the night, cherry blossoms or autumn leaves lit up at night, or the moment you turn on a fluorescent light -

when the light hits a familiar object, it would often look different from what we know. It feels that when rays of light cross each other to light up an object, it gives us a key to a deeper understanding of it. This may be a hindsight truth but seems to happen quite often.

Unlike movies, moving pictures made of still images – in other words, animations – have the unrealistic feel to them, or shall I call it the realism characteristic to such images? Anyway, I feel that the beauty of animations is that they allow us to concentrate on the way an object appears to us.

Credit :

2018
Animated GIFs
List of bronze statues:
Albert Plesman, Den Haag 1959
Albert Schweitzer, Deventer 1975
Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Amsterdam 1966
Wim Kan and Corry Vonk, Amsterdam 1986/ Den Haag 1997