Exploring the limits of the frame(s)

Beauty is everywhere. Of course there are cliché paradise sunsets or awestriking mountain ranges, these are beautiful no doubt and I shoot them too, but here and now beauty is hidden around the corner. My photography is for a large part about a fascination for and a discovering of beauty in the everyday. Responding to the everyday in a poetic way. We walk around, we go to work, we spend time with the kids and friends, we wait for buses, we go from here to there; ordinary life and its rhythm of repetitive actions is, I think, a source of great beauty. Often the environment and built space around us is of no particular beauty or interest. At first glance that is. When reframing, looking in a more specific way, beauty is all over.

Within one image several images can be hidden. Using strong horizontals or verticals it is possible to divide the frame and create several frames within a frame. The singular image is then transformed into a kaleidoscopic image showing multiple images within the image. Looking around a person processes thousands of images each from infinite different angles and perspectives. That’s how our idea of reality is created, as an accumulation of these millions of images. This is ever more the case in our age of mass media and our continuous exposure to never-ending streams of images. 

Starting from the everyday and using this idea of "frames in a frame" I’m always looking for a kind of transformation of the image. I’m trying to add a level of abstraction in order to elevate the image to another level. I think what’s interesting about photography is exactly this transformative power: a recognizable banal situation can be transformed into a more abstract composition surpassing the original meaning of what we see at first sight. Through the composition, the framing, or the deconstruction in several frames an interesting transformation can take place.

Parallel to my photography I have always been drawing and experimenting within the visual arts. In the multiplex works shown below the theme of the “frame” and the “frames within a frame” also appear. These multiplex artworks show a composition of different frames, different viewpoints. The texture of the wood symbolizes “nature” or “life” and runs through and behind the frames. The frames litterally bring order, organize different scenes of the infinite life beyond. I think it’s interesting to think about this contrast between the natural, the infinite, the chaotic and the frame which organizes, which is rational, which is finite. Photography is similar to this artwork. The frame of the camera is also finite, a frame organizing forms; capturing (framing) a part of the infinite wide world.

Shot with a Pentax SP1000 camera 

2025