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Frank van der Salm (NL)
(1) Please introduce yourself: What is your name, where are you from, what do you do?
Hi, I'm Frank van der Salm, born in Delft, but working and living in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where I also have my studio. Both my own projects and works on commission deal with the urban environment, architecture, and the changes that digitalisation and globalisation have (had) on our urban experience.
(2) What is your relationship with photography and how did you get into it?
Since a young kid, I've always taken family photographs, but it wasn't until 3 years of studying Geodesy at the Technical University of Delft that I decided to change and focus on Visual Arts. Both painting and photography were my main concerns, for video to follow later. Since graduating from the Willem de Kooning Academy in 1992, photography and video rule my world, first of all focusing on landscapes, later urban landscapes in the broadest sense of the word.
(3) What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?
It's both planned and intuitive. Planning my trips takes a lot of time researching the topics and means reading and talking quite a lot, searching the internet, etc., every way possible. After that, I kind of know what certain locations might provide, and I go, after which it's working intuitively. But, on location, there's still a lot of scouting involved, before the actual photography happens. Getting to know a place live is actually necessary, to have an idea of scale, differences in population numbers, viewpoints, etc. Only after a week or so, in which I've visited a lot of spots both during the day and during the night, does the camera come into view.It's both planned and intuitive. Planning my trips takes a lot of time researching the topics and means reading and talking quite a lot, searching the internet, etc., every way possible. After that, I kind of know what certain locations might provide, and I go, after which it's working intuitively. But, on location, there's still a lot of scouting involved, before the actual photography happens. Getting to know a place live is actually necessary, to have an idea of scale, differences in population numbers, viewpoints, etc. Only after a week or so, in which I've visited a lot of spots both during the day and during the night, does the camera come into view.
(4) What is the story you want your pictures to tell?
That differs. I regard photography not as a tool of registration and not as a way of creating series in a purely documentary way. Since reality is different everywhere, the photographic technique I use to transform reality and bring it into my own realm differs as well. Photography is not about the defining moment to me, but a way of prolonging time in itself. With a photograph, you leave reality behind and create something new. Reality is a starting point, of course, but that's it. And reality is not only the 3D environment, but everything that is building our ideas and thoughts on urbanity, like LCD screens, advertising leaflets, models, etc. So, there's no series, there's no registration, only the creation of single pieces and every time a technical approach that suits that specific situation. If you'd do want to discuss my work in a documentary sense, it would not be a document of a building or an environment or a situation, but a documentation of time and space itself. My ideas on photography and its role are therefore not as much about telling people something, for in a digitised and globalised world there are too many images telling us where to go, what to do, and how to behave. We’re overloaded with images. To take people seriously, to value them, I have to involve them and that means I have to create an opportunity for the viewer. What do you think, as a viewer? Although my scenes are mostly void of people, it's all about people. What we build, how we connect, what we leave behind is more telling about who we as a people are, as a species. The viewer is the only one present and needs to decide on his/her position with the images. Who am I and what do I think of that? The images are recognisable West orientated, I sometimes refer to them as focussed on consumer orientated societies. We know these places, but where am I? Is this true? Is this who we are? In the diversity of the images, there's the opportunity to collect and to connect, to build your own idea of what reality is and what it exists of. It's much more than consuming of images and/or appreciating its aesthetic presence.
(5) Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?
For now, it would be Abu Dhabi/Dubai or Nur Sultan, for my latest view on photography deals with cities that present themselves as cities of the future, and that's what these cities do.
(6) What is your personal relationship to cities and how do you perceive them as places in general?
Cities are places of creation and change, and that's what I value most about them. Where cultures come together and collide, where changes are rapid and far-reaching, where people need to improvise with the ample space available, and where new ideas on what reality is are born. I do value the countryside and wide-open spaces in the mountains as well, but with a world population now over 50% living in big cities, these cities have become our new natural habitat.
(7) What is the driving force behind creation?
The driving force behind creation is multiple. The inner need and arrogance that I think I have something to say about the places we live in and the ways we deal with others and media, for example. But also, to rethink what exists in our daily lives and the extremities of what we build on sometimes on a nonhuman scale, or the way we envision the future and the inner necessity to create something of immaterial value in a world that values money most of all.
(8) Which project did you never finish?
None, but some projects come out better than others, of course.
(9) What is that «one thing» you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?
I don't really work thinking that way, so that didn't happen literally, but I once had in mind photographing in the cities of the former Warsaw Pact, right after that became possible. That didn't happen for several reasons.
(10) If you could travel back / forth in time, what advice would you give your younger / older self?
My advice would be to travel more, travel longer, and create bigger projects.
(11) What do you prefer saying: To «take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?
«Make» a photograph, also see my earlier answers. I don't take something to myself, take it away, because when photographing I don't reduce or multiply reality. It's a very strong feeling that I’ve had all my professional life. To me it's of no use referring to a photograph as referring to the situation we already have right before taking it. What would that add? Creation is more important than anything else. By making a photograph it also includes the process after taking it. It doesn't matter how far digital manipulation goes or where the image is taken from, it's the image itself, the end result, that should communicate what I want to communicate. Whether it's true to reality doesn't matter to me, as long as it's true to myself. To me, when it's about photography, copying is a no-go, lying isn’t.
(12) What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?
In Shanghai, I wanted to photograph from one of the balconies of one of the upper floors of an office building, near the harbour. I thought I would need to do a lot of explanation, so I went over to a security guy, who just stepped aside and invited me in without a word. I don't speak Chinese. Near the elevator, a hostess opened the doors and showed me in, pushing a button for one of the higher floors. It was like she was expecting me and knew where I wanted to go. Still not a word. Once arrived, the doors opened, and another hostess pointed me towards an office. I went in, to a large conference room, with no people, but a door to a balcony on the right. I entered the balcony, where I photographed the city for an hour and a half. During this process, the curtains behind me were closed, so I was on the balcony, and nobody saw me there. Once I finished photographing, I re-entered the conference room, which by then was completely filled with a mixture of Chinese and Western businessmen and decorated officials. The discussion they were in fell completely silent when they saw me entering from the balcony. They were very surprised, to say the least. The chairman, who did speak English apparently, asked me what I had been doing there and that it was illegal for me to be there at all, let alone photograph. I apologised and left the building quickly. Most probably, the security guy and the hostesses had mistakenly thought I was there for the conference. The work I photographed is Cycle (2006).
(13) If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?
I'd either be an architect or an archaeologist.
(14) How would you describe one of your pictures to a visually impaired person?
Imagine a place and let's call it a city. Imagine a place where a lot of people with different backgrounds have come together with different needs, hopes, dreams, and built a lot of different structures of concrete and steel, large and small, where they live and work. Imagine all of them going to different places to make money and how you would organise the millions that are on the move to achieve this. Imagine how an organisation of these movements is possible or impossible and imagine how a political system and an economic system that's based on making money and make-believe influences the ways we can experience these worlds. Imagine products that are visible all over the city telling us what to buy and how to dress, what to think and what to do, and imagine you encounter these products more each day and then imagine that you have total freedom to decide on your response to these machinations. Who are you in this urban world? Now, imagine 2D-images, multiple, diverse, dealing with how people control their spaces, control nature, define what nature is, like the bonsai tree, a climax of human control over nature, (Detail, 2007), where nature has become culture and with a lot of other images that are referring to these urban mentality and to the places where over the years improvisation has meant places do change and develop into spaces that are on the one hand providing and on the other hand limiting certain groups of people.... Imagine that all of these images combined are conceptually woven together, but aesthetically and in its presentation are as diverse as the cities they are taken from. Imagine what you would think of these images and think it. Think big and think small, think blurry and in detail, think presence and oblivion and you have my pictures.
(15) What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?
A first visit to Osaka and the 1970s World Expo site, my new project will focus on the future of cities. That will bring me to both places I've been before but also new locations. What it will bring, I don't know, and that's part of the excitement…
Thank you, Frank.
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Images
1–20 Frank van der Salm, 2014–2021.
Info
↘︎ Website
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