The story behind the photographs

Thirty years as an entrepreneur taught me to observe before I act. To read people, timing and atmosphere. To notice the small connection others might miss. I did not know then that I was also learning how to photograph.

I am based in Amsterdam, but only for part of the year. Much of my life happens elsewhere, usually with my camera and with Yvette, my partner.

Travel is my great passion. Not as a list of countries, but as a way of being in the world. New landscapes, unfamiliar streets, wildlife, markets, people, silence, movement, weather and waiting. I photograph the moment a place begins to reveal itself, when light gives it atmosphere and something ordinary becomes impossible to ignore.

I travel and work with Yvette Bax, a travel writer who has been turning journeys into stories for more than twenty years. She has always known when a place is worth going to, even before it becomes obvious. A forgotten village, a local lead, a place not yet on anyone's list.

We often stand in the same place and look for different things. She follows the story. I follow the light. Her words and my photographs come from the same journeys, the same early mornings, the same conversations, the same sudden reasons to stop.

The work we make together has a journalistic core. It finds its way into magazines and publications such as Holland Herald, JAN and JFK, as reportage that needs both words and images to be fully told. Everything on this site began that way, as a journey we made together.

In quite a few photographs, you will find Yvette too. She is part of the story, not only the person writing it. She is my favourite travelling companion, and the one I come home with.

My photographs begin with instinct, not technique. The moment when a place shifts and reveals what it actually is. I shoot wide and close, from altitude and at eye level, landscapes and people within the same trip. I photograph what is happening, not what has been arranged.

What I keep looking for is that brief moment when the light, the place and the story fall together, and I can bring it home.