After being born I spent the first 19 years of my life in Leeuwarden, a town in the North of the Netherlands. To English people I often say it can be seen as the equivalent of a Dutch Glasgow - although to be fair I’ve never been to Glasgow. In 2005 I moved to London for love and also to build a career in photography. Commercial photography was given up on, as I quickly realised  it would be easier to make a living in different ways and I had no passion for commercial photography anyway. But I have consistently been working on making art with photography as my main medium. 

My projects usually involve people as I find people interesting. I love involving them with a project asking them to participate somehow, usually by adding text or drawings to a portrait or image. In 2005, for Return to Sender, I sent 500 hand written letters with an image to random people all across the UK, asking for a response. For the HAIR project I asked people to have all their hair cut off and to then reflect on that. In the pandemic I photographed the neighbours in black and white to then revisit them 2 years later inside their houses, shooting them in colour now. For Take a Look at Yourself I photographed 150 people with a large plate camera over a period of 8 years, to then ask them to have a really long good look at the image, and reflect. 

As I’m typing this the world around me is rapidly changing. As if climate change wasn’t enough, ai now seems to be threatening the way we live for good and/or bad. When I look online now I’m never really sure anymore what’s real and what not. Perhaps it’s just me because I’m old (over 40) but I love real things. So when you look at my projects and images, rest assured that it’s all real. All images were shot on film. Even though I make a living with photoshop, I never alter any of the images I shoot, apart from colour and dust. All the people in my images are real people, they exist, live and breathe and have real thoughts and feelings. Nothing is ai generated. 

I’m not against ai as I’m sure it has many very useful purposes but in the end I do also want to be surrounded by real things. Every thing you’ll find here is real. For those with time on their hands who like my work it might be worth visiting www.asortofdiary.com which is a visual outlet of what’s kept me busy over the years, started in 2005 on the day I moved from the Netherlands to London. 

2024 published Take a Look at Yourself, hardcover, 80 pages

2024 published Getting to Know the Neighbours, newspaper format

2024 Take a look at Yourself exhibition in Ye Olde Rose and Crown in London

2020 included in Portrait of Humanity book and exhibition

2019 included in Portrait of Humanity book and exhibition

2017 exhibition for Caña Magazine in Barcelona - selection of London nightlife photos

2017 solo exhibition of Take a Look at Yourself at St Joseph Hospice in Hackney, London

2017 inclusion in Renaissance Photography Prize at the Getty Arts Gallery in London

2017 inclusion in Portrait of Britain, advertising boards all over the United Kingdom

2014 selected for the Photographers Playbook, published by Aperture

2013 published Return to Sender, hardcover, 512 pages - shortlisted for the Aperture first photobook award in Paris

2013 published Doggies, hardcover, 30 pages

2013 exhibition at Unseen Amsterdam with Lucid-Ly

2013 exhibition at Gup gallery Amsterdam

2010 exhibition of Gumtree project at Viewfinder Gallery in Greenwich London