Brabant is a province in the south of The Netherlands. It is the landscape of my childhood.
This landscape is a small-scale landscape, it is densely populated, industrialized and crammed with all kinds of built objects. Since my childhood days, I have seen Brabant changing continuously and often rapidly. These changes in the landscape are, of course, the result of our efforts to provide food, housing and other needs for a growing population. Eventually to create a better world for more and more people. I look at these changes with mixed feelings; the inevitable changes have an upside and downside. The downside has to do with the loss.
The images of the Brabant series show mainly rural places. It is precisely this rural aspect of the landscape that has got lost largely in the last fifty years.
The Brabant series has originated from my profound feeling of loss. The loss of familiar places, the loss of the original landscape and the visible history of it, and of course the loss of biodiversity and free space. My photos show aspects of the present-day use of the land. For the time being and in all its impermanence.

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Thieu Riemen (website)