On De Correspondent I’ve started a new project to investigate the need of horrific pictures in media. As an image editor for journalistic media for over seven years now, I’ve had some experience with the difficulties – like “need” versus “ethics” – of (not) publishing these kind of images. But I would like to extent my research with contributions of others to get more perspectives on this theme.
You can read my introduction on this project here [only in Dutch].
For Dude #1 – the Dutch Designers Magazine by BNO – I wrote a column on the work of Richard Mosse, on invitation of Harald Dunnink (head designer of Momkai) who was the guest editor-in-chief of this issue.
[read here the longer version in Dutch]
For the past half year I’ve been investigating the archive of the White House photographer Pete Souza. The result is a series of ten collections I’ve composed and analysed from the whole archive. The project is published on De Correspondent [only in Dutch].
Find here more information on the whole project.
[Photo’s: Pete Souza/the White House]
For the ‘Stadsleven‘ blog of Tracy Metz I wrote a column about
a photograph of Jordi Huisman’s project Rear Window.
Now this column is also published on the website of De Groene.
Last week I visited the exhibition of The Enclave by Richard Mosse in the Irish pavilion during La Biennale di Venezia. And because I was blown away by the project as well as by the presentation of the work, I wrote a recommendation on De Correspondent in the hope that some museum will bring this exhibition to Holland.
Read here my recommendation, including a video registration of the installation.
For De Correspondent I’m investigating the photographic archive of White House photographer Pete Souza (as it is published on flickr). By categorising the images into self-defined collection I’m able to analyse the way imagery is used as a tool for staged representation.
As starting point I wrote the introduction “the White House Photographer”
on this project (I’m still working on).
My first blog. [dutch only]
About what sort of image editor I want to be for De Correspondent.
[published in nrc.next, May 4th 2012, dutch only]
Dit is wat fotografie kan en waarom fotografie nodig is
De Ierse fotograaf Richard Mosse werkt in conflictgebieden. In tegenstelling tot bij veel oorlogsfotografie, is het geweld in zijn werk niet het onderwerp, maar een gegeven. Hij focust zich niet op gewelddadigheden, maar op de uitwassen daarvan. Daardoor kan hij dingen anders laten zien. Zoals niemand ze ooit heeft gezien. Oorlog is gruwelijk, maar ook heel ver weg. We hebben er een beeld van in ons hoofd, gevormd door wat we zien in de media. Hoe bloederig ook, we zijn er gewend aan geraakt. Maar de foto’s in dit boek van Mosse zijn esthetisch, prachtig van kleur en compositie. Het is die schoonheid waardoor de gruwelijke werkelijkheid extra hard binnenkomt.
[published in nrc.next, May 10th 2011]
This is an article I wrote about how I, as an image editors, have to deal with horrible pictures of massacres in Ivory Coast every day. By showing these pictures to the readers we always get a lot of angry letters of people telling us that they don’t want to be confronted with these pictures with their children at breakfast. So readers are to upset and don’t read the article at all. At the same time, by not publishing these pictures, the newspaper don’t tell the real horrible story going on in Ivory Coast.