About aRtV photography

What follows is not so much a biography as a reflection on a form of photography.
I was recently asked whether emotions should play a part in taking photographs. Can they have an unintended influence on the desired result?
Well, in my view, they always do. It’s just that this happens at different levels.
You can take technically perfect photographs without feeling anything emotionally. But when you photograph based on a ‘gut feeling’, something else happens: you react to a combination of light, the situation, the person, the surroundings and, above all, your own state of mind at that moment.
That absolutely does not mean that those images automatically have an autobiographical meaning.
And that is an important nuance.
A photographer can take a picture whilst feeling sad without the image being ‘about sadness’.
Or take a picture during a happy period which, in hindsight, when circumstances have changed, takes on a completely different meaning.
The viewer would never be able to deduce the photographer’s personal state of mind from it.
But you yourself, as the photographer, can discover that in hindsight.
And perhaps that is one of the interesting things about my work: I don’t always seem to come up with a story first and then take a photograph.
Sometimes it seems to happen the other way round: I take a photograph because something about the situation moves me, and only later do I discover why.
Of course, that’s not a general rule, but it is actually a very interesti