The world around us is changing rapidly. As if climate change weren’t enough, AI now seems set to change the way we live for good and/or bad. When I look online now, I’m never really sure what’s real and what’s not. Perhaps it’s just me getting older, but I love real things. When you look at my projects and images, know that it’s all real. Everything was shot on film, and nothing was altered. All the people in my images are real people who exist (or existed), live and breathe, and have real thoughts and feelings.

I was born in Leeuwarden, a small town in the north of the Netherlands, and spent the first 19 years of my life there. In 2005 I moved to London for love and to pursue a life in photography. While making a living as a retoucher, I have consistently been making art with photography as my main medium. Although I’m very proficient in Photoshop, I never alter my own work, apart from grading.

My projects usually involve people. I love involving them by asking them to participate, usually by adding text or drawings to a portrait or image. From 2008, for Return to Sender, I sent 500 handwritten letters with an image to random people across the UK, asking for a response. For HAIR I asked people to have all their hair cut off and then reflect on that. During the pandemic I photographed the neighbours in black and white, then revisited them two years later inside their houses, this time shooting in colour. For Take a Look at Yourself I photographed 150 people with a large plate camera over a period of eight years, then asked them to have a really long, good look at the image and reflect.

Selected CV

2026 Selected to take part in the Bristol Photography Book Fair
2026 Included in Spread of the Day exhibition and publication, Photobook Café, London
2024 Published Take a Look at Yourself, hardcover, 80 pages
2024 Published Getting to Know the Neighbours, newspaper format
2024 Take a Look at Yourself exhibition, Ye Olde Rose and Crown, London
2020 Included in Portrait of Humanity book and exhibition
2019 Included in Portrait of Humanity book and exhibition
2017 Exhibition for Caña Magazine, Barcelona: selection of London nightlife photos
2017 Solo exhibition of Take a Look at Yourself, St Joseph Hospice, Hackney, London
2017 Included in the Renaissance Prize, Getty Arts Gallery, London
2017 Included in Portrait of Britain, advertising boards across the United Kingdom
2014 Selected for The Photographer’s Playbook, published by Aperture
2013 Published Return to Sender, hardcover, 512 pages, shortlisted for the Aperture First Photobook Award, Paris
2013 Published Doggies, hardcover, 30 pages
2013 Exhibition at Unseen Amsterdam with Lucid-Ly
2013 Exhibition at GUP Gallery, Amsterdam
2010 Exhibition of Gumtree project, Viewfinder Gallery, Greenwich, London