TOUCHED BY THE SEA

I used to live close to the sea. Now that I no longer do, I still feel drawn to it. The Dutch Wadden Sea is the closest to my home. It’s not a “real ocean” but an intertidal zone, constantly changing due to light and wind. What fascinates me is how transformation and the passage of time reveal themselves so clearly in this landscape.

For the past few years, I have been traveling along the Wadden Sea coast, documenting both the physical landscape and the emotions it evokes through photography, with accompanying texts still in progress.

In parallel, I have also travelled through literature, reading everything I can find about the Wadden Sea, from fiction to non-fiction. Fiction writers with a poetic gaze on this region have provided me with deep inspiration, revealing the many layers of history embedded in this landscape.

You can literally see the past in the land, if you have an eye for it.
During my research, I came across the work of Katie Ritson and Eveline de Smalen, who explored how literature has shaped perceptions of the Wadden Sea. Their findings are fascinating, offering insights into how we might imagine the future of this fragile ecosystem.

At the core of this project lies the idea of transience, the way landscapes evolve, how time leaves its marks, and how, ultimately, this mirrors the impermanence of life itself.

My photographs, taken with a pinhole camera and long exposure times, aim to capture this sense of passing time.

Some images have an exposure time of just a minute and a half, while others span an entire week. In these images, you can see the sun’s path across the sky during the day. The lines are sometimes interrupted, revealing moments of cloud cover. Other “sun paths” are created by moving the camera towards the sun after the exposure.

Through this white line, I aim to make passing time visible, linking the present moment to something unknown, something beyond our immediate perception.

This project is continuously evolving.

If you would like to learn more about this project, you can read my blog posts such as:

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