| All my photo projects start the same—with a gradually developing obsession with something that crosses my path, whether it’s a book, a story, a documentary or an object seen in a museum.
Gathering source material often leads me to make an extensive study of the related subjects. I try to categorize my sources, to sound out their essence. This results in a series of exemplary sets of texts,images and objects: information that seems to encapsulate various aspects of a certain time and place, or of a specific activity. |
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The Devil Drives- Jasper de Beijer
All my photo projects start the same—with a gradually developing obsession with something that crosses my path, whether it’s a book, a story, a documentary or an object seen in a museum.
Gathering source material often leads me to make an extensive study of the related subjects. I try to categorize my sources, to sound out their essence. This results in a series of exemplary sets of texts, images and objects: information that seems to encapsulate various aspects of a certain time and place, or of a specific activity.
We experience reality through interpretation. For me, the most interesting feature of this process is that the interpretation of reality gains a new actuality, forming a corpus of imagery that becomes more and more disconnected from what actually took place. This is where images start to lead their own life—becoming more or less autonomous. Historical events are transformed into a collection of images and anecdotes that combine to form a new, living phenomenon. The further these images and stories are removed from their original context, the more one can read them as a new narrative rather than as a dramatic report on reality.
For me as an artist, this process of transformation creates a new arena within which to operate. Dissected from reality, the images I find can be manipulated, condensed, fragmented, amplified or ignored altogether. Using my source material as a starting point, I try to create a separate world, a realm of the imagination. This gives me the opportunity to orchestrate and dramatize what I have come across in my research and to breathe new life into the elements that I find important and exemplary.
Literally rebuilding the world of my fascination, I use all the means I see fit. Often, this leads to physically recreating this world in a scale model, which I use as the basis for photographic images. In some cases, I go on to digitally manipulate and assemble these images on the computer. Occasionally, I even use life-size sets and actors, which are also incorporated in the final work.
The result is a kind of study into the enduring impact of transient images and situations. The main focus of my efforts is to arrive at a kind of essential narrative, where images and associations combine to tell a story that is completely their own. Ultimately, my work constitutes a separate world, where historical reality has lost its context and imagination takes over.
