I was born in Deventer, the Netherlands, on the 6th of August 1980 as the second child to a normal middle-class family. My parents used to run our family business in pointing and renovations. My older brother Steven has chosen a career as a financial specialist, and I…. well….I’m just carving my own way into this photography malarcky.
My first recollection of photography is when my father presented me with a Kodak Polaroid camera somewhere around the mid-80′s and two whole rolls of film I could use with it. I would not own my own camera until many years later, when a friend had a Praktica super TL-2 ‘spare’ that shot 35mm film.
In 1999 I started working towards an Art Degree at the AKI art college in Enschede, the Netherlands. Here I attended mixed media, photography and illustration classes but I felt I lacked the knowledge and/ or life experience to create any worthwhile art. In 2001 I decided to go to University (Nijmegen and Utrecht, the Netherlands) to study Religions and Medieval Literature, resulting in a BA and a MA degree.
I have always held a fascination for the dark, weird, wonderful and bizarre, so influences of my studies can usually be found throughout work.
In 2008 my partner Sean and I moved to the UK where he was hired as a games designer for Ubisoft Reflections in Newcastle-Upon Tyne. There, I had two staff photography jobs in high street studios and was even appointed assistant head photographer: a position I kept until Sean switched jobs to Codemasters and we moved to Leamington Spa in the Midlands.
Currently, I work part-time for private art and photograph dealer Linus Carr (www.linuscarr.com), shoot model portfolio’s for children (www.chillikids.co.uk), photographs the odd wedding or two and undertake my own photographic projects. Vintage photography has captured my imagination and I’m always working towards a better understanding of it’s history, processes and imagery. I work mostly with a Canon 50D digital camera in colour as well as with a few TLR medium format film camera’s in Black and White.