The Water

Water has always played an important role in my life. As a young boy I would spend a lot of time helping my grandfather at the market close to the harbor. My father worked at a shipping company. My wife grew up on an island close to the Finnish seaside.

Many years later, I started to photograph the coastline between the German-Polish borders and Cherbourg on the French coast. I wondered what might be behind the water. I wondered too if I could see the other side. The photographs from those trips did not result in a project but much later I did my best to get The Fisherman project located on the coasts near Dunkerque (France), Helsinki (Finland), and Rotterdam (the Netherlands).

Water is important for the work of many artists and painters who have inspired me. I have made pictures of a selection of those “waters” using a large format camera with a digital camera at the back. With this technique, I made series of hundreds of pictures several times a day of the same “water”.

These series of hundreds of pictures were combined in Photoshop. I searched for pictures that took on a life of their own: pictures that were inspired by the water photographed but which were not necessarily pictures of that water. The result was one large format picture of each series.