In the beginning

I was born one early summer morning in an old fashioned hospital in Crystal Palace, London from an Irish mother and a Dutch father. After briefly residing in the quiet London suburb of Beckenham, we moved to Holland. We took residence on the top floor of my grandparents house. As a young boy I loved to play with my granddad's old camera's. I can remember a large black Bakelite camera, which I recently identified as a 1950's Boyer Photax. My granddad was an avid amateur photographer. I still own a small collection of his slides and assorted pictures and a few of his old camera's. I guess watching him taking pictures is what started me off. 

Instamatic gratification

In 1972 my grandmother brought back a Kodak instamatic 100 camera from the US for my birthday. I can still remember how chuffed I was. It came in a plastic display case with a roll of 110 film and one of these square plug-in flashcubes and a black strap. I still have the negatives of that first roll of film. I bought my first SLR, a Nikon FE2, in 1983. My then girlfriend and I set up a dark room in the bathroom of our apartment and we started doing our own developing and printing. I used to build elaborate installations in our living room to experiment with depth of field and lighting techniques. I dragged my camera everywhere I went, roaming around the streets, documenting the world around me.

Current affairs

Since then I have seen a fair bit of the world and although I indulged in several sidetrack careers as a musician, graphic artist and designer, I never lost track of my core interest: photography.

Nowadays I focus more or less exclusively on fine art photography with an obsessive compulsion to substantiate society in all it's tainted splendour.