During my whole life as a photographer I have made fiction related work. I choose my models carefully and style every detail; From the clothing to the surroundings.
I love to be in control and create my own world.
During this semester I have experimented quite a lot with documentary photography.
I have made a series where I observed one of my roommates and I made a series of a church community in the Hague. During this process I noticed how determined I was to getting to know these people and showing them in their truest way possible.
My biggest inspiration has always been people and their behavior. But instead of building a character inspired by people as I do in my fiction work, the documentary work was about capturing people as they are. I loved doing that so much that it convinced me to go for documentary.
This doesn’t mean that I necessarily want to practice the classic documentary style, and let complete loose of the staging, I think you can combine the two. But I do want to change my way of working. I want to take the role of observer and show my genuine interest in other people (or things). It is a way of showing my story and my experiences.

Raimond has been a great inspiration for me this semester. He teaches the documentary class and gave regular feedback on my series. Talking about what I want to tell with my work and how to achieve it was super interesting. It was about capturing raw emotions instead of staging them and that was eye opening to me. Raimond said that my portfolio came off as very commercial and not as the work of an artist. I am aware of that and have heard that a lot this year. Going for documentary and almost not being able to make these kinds of images would be a great help for me to experiment and get out of my safe zone.
Choosing documentary would be a great way to practice something that I have no background in. With fiction I do have and I tend to call back to my old style.
I have so many interest and things that I am mad about, with everything happening in the world right now I feel the urge to show the real world and address certain issues.

I will now talk about some of the failures and successes that I had this year.
Let’s start with process, my worst failure. Documenting my process is something that I am not good at. I forget to keep track of the steps I made and fail to document them.
I am too focussed on the end result but I should be focussing on the process leading up to it. Because that is thé thing that you learn from.
When it comes to professionality, I have also lacked a lot. Handing my work in when it’s past the due date, or not showing up in online class are things that are not unfamiliar to me.
Not as an excuse but rather as an explanation I’d like to address that I have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) which makes it hard for me to focus, especially when the structure of going to school falls away. I am planning to get professional help with this in the next year.
One of the successes this year is that I have gained much more knowledge of art and this has made my ‘world’ a lot bigger. The understanding of art has changed the way that I look at my surroundings and makes it easier to position myself in the world of photography.
Other than that I feel like I have tried a lot of new, creative things that I normally wouldn’t have made. This academy is an addition to my life and mind state. I am looking forward to making more and cooler things next year!

Thankyou <3