My work stems from a fascination with the place. Photography is a means to explore and examine how I relate to places and spaces. Place as a phenomenon fascinates me because of its omnipresence; we move through places in each moment of the day, it’s what we see around us, it’s where we meet each other, it’s the decor as it were in which our lives play out. I believe places to have a, maybe subconscious, but profound influence on our state of mind. Still, places are becoming more scarce in the world. Even in still and remote landscapes, there are unmistakable traces of people to be found, which made me wonder even more what ‘true silence’ is or what it means. Anchors is my personal search and confrontation with stillness, emptiness, and being-alone; in my inner world as well as the outside world around me.

In 2012 I got interested in silence; what it is, where it occurs, what it means or provokes. Starting from small villages, the landscapes I felt drawn to and which I was photographing, became quieter and quieter. The desert then slowly became my focus. The desert is not only a place where it’s literally quiet but can also be interpreted as a metaphor for silence; it’s where a specific place and a ‘state of mind’ comes together. But to me being in silence is a two-sided experience; it brings me closer to myself, yet at the same time it is frightening to look at. Confronted with the vastness of and silence in the landscape, I was looking for something to hold on to in the images I was making. A branch, a rock, a tree, a house, an anchor. ‘Anchors’ therefore became the title of the book in which 24 images are brought together. The images are made between 2012 and 2015 on the Dutch Islands, in small Belgian and Southern France villages, the New Mexican desert USA, the Tibetan Highlands, and the Moroccan Sahara.