Standing there, I realized that almost everything that moved me this month had the same thing in common. It was not about the surface. It was about the structure underneath it. The order you only notice when you stop looking at the obvious thing.

Here is what stayed with me.

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Michael Wolf, Paris Rooftops

Those rooftops sent me straight back to Michael Wolf and his series Paris Rooftops. Wolf photographed the roofs of Paris with everything in focus, framed so tightly that the city dissolves into pure geometry. No towers, no monuments, none of the Paris you are sold on a postcard. Just lines, colour, and repetition, until you genuinely cannot tell whether you are looking at a photograph or a painting.

What I admire most is how simple it is. He did not invent anything. He refused to photograph the obvious Paris and pointed his camera at what everyone walks past. The result is one of the most recognizable bodies of work I know, built entirely from something hidden in plain sight. That is the hardest kind of originality. Not adding more, but seeing what is already there.

Hannsjörg Voth, Goldene Spirale

From a city of roofs to an empty desert. Hannsjörg Voth is a German artist who spent around twenty years building a small group of monumental structures on the Marha Plain in southern Morocco. The one I keep returning to is the Goldene Spirale, the Golden Spiral, built between 1992 and 1994.

It is a wall of compressed earth, 260 metres long, that curls into a perfect spiral and rises to six metres. The plan follows the golden section, the same Fibonacci proportion you find in shells and plants. At the centre he dug a well, and in the well floats a single boat. A piece of mathematics, made by hand, alone, in one of the emptiest places on earth.

What gets me is that he built it from clay, knowing it would slowly erode. The decay is part of the work. He made something based on the oldest order we know, and then handed it back to time. I pulled on this same thread earlier this year in Slow space, fast matter, where a sculptor and a gardener taught me about matter, patience, and what it means to work with time instead of against it. His other desert works, the Himmelstreppe and the Stadt des Orion, follow the same instinct, and they are all worth looking up.

10 Corso Como, Milan

Something completely different, but the same thread. I visited 10 Corso Como in Milan in March, one of the best shops and exhibition spaces in the city, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. It is the space Carla Sozzani opened in 1990, and the place that more or less invented the idea of the concept store.

What I love about it is that it is not a shop in the way people later copied it. It is a curated world. Fashion, design, books, a photography gallery, a café, all chosen by one person with one point of view, arranged so the whole thing reads like a magazine you can walk through. Most stores sell you things. This one shows you a way of seeing, and the products are almost a side effect.

It is a reminder that curation is a creative act in itself. The order you put things in, what you place next to what, the rhythm of a space. That is composition, the same as in a photograph. I wrote a whole essay around this idea, Does Every City Need an Art Director?, about what happens when no single eye is responsible for how a place looks. 10 Corso Como is the opposite case. A space where one eye is responsible for everything, and you can feel it the moment you walk in.

Daniel Arsham, Future Relic

And to close, a book. Daniel Arsham, the artist known for his fictional archaeology, those eroded, calcified casts of everyday objects that look like they were dug up a thousand years from now, just published Future Relic.

I expected a beautiful art book. It is something more honest than that. The full title is Failures, Disasters, Detours, and How I Made a Career as an Artist, and that is exactly what it is. Arsham writes openly about the wrong turns, the things that did not work, the unglamorous reality behind a career that looks effortless from the outside.

As someone who built his own path without an obvious map, this one hit home. We see the finished work, the shows, the collaborations. We almost never see the structure underneath, the years of detours and failures that actually hold it all up. I once approached this from the other side in Why I photograph what I can’t remember, about work that only makes sense long after you make it. Arsham makes future relics out of objects. In this book, he does it with his own story, and shows you the foundations under the surface.

That, in the end, was my month. Four very different makers, all pointing at the same thing. The surface is never the interesting part. What holds it up is.

What stayed with you this month?

– Bastiaan

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The news: as of today, we can ship to the United States again, after more than a year of being closed to one of our largest markets.

Below I will tell you what made that year so difficult, and how we solved it. But if you are here for the work, here is what is waiting. The book stands I design and produce in the Netherlands. My newest book, Henro. And the last copies of Rhythm, my ten-year retrospective, which is almost sold out before the next one arrives. All of it, for the next two weeks, with 10% off.

First, in case this is a side of my work you do not know yet. Alongside my photography, I am the founder of 1605 Collective. Since 2020 we have been making and shipping art books and book stands from the Netherlands, built around one belief: that a book is not only a container for images, but an object worth holding, displaying, and living with. We publish my own work and the work of other artists, and we send it around the world.

Books are the heart of what we do, but the book stands are the piece people tend to fall in love with. I designed them myself, and they come from a frustration I had for years. A beautiful art book spends most of its life closed, spine-out on a shelf, hidden. That always felt wrong to me. A book you care about should be seen.

The V-Stand is the answer to that. It is a minimal steel stand that sits low on the table, so the book appears to float and falls open at the right angle no matter how thick it is. You can read it sitting down, or leave it open on a table as the object it is. The V-Stand XL does the same for larger books and portfolio boxes. And the T-Stand, the big brother of the family, is a matte steel tripod built to hold large-format books and fine art portfolios as if they were sculpture. Each one is produced here in the Netherlands, in black or white matte steel, and made to last for years rather than seasons. They exist for one reason. To take the book off the shelf and put it back into the room.

As for the books, the next two weeks are a good moment to order, for more than one reason.

Rhythm, my ten-year retrospective, is almost sold out. I am currently working on a new overview book, which means these are some of the last copies of Rhythm that will ever be available. If you have been considering it as a collector’s item, this is close to your final chance.

My newest book, Henro, is also available. It follows a pilgrimage across the island of Shikoku in Japan, eighty-eight temples connected by more than a thousand kilometres of mountains and coast, and it is the most personal book I have made in a long time.

Beyond my own work, the shop holds more titles, including books by other artists we publish, alongside the full range of stands.

Now, the news I promised to explain, and the reason these weeks carry extra weight.

Since April of last year, we were unable to send anything to the United States. The trade war and the new tariffs changed everything. The carriers we relied on stopped shipping to the US altogether, because customs had built up enormous backlogs and parcels were getting stuck for weeks. On top of that, the tariffs were charged to the American customer on arrival, so people were suddenly asked to pay extra for something they had already bought. Some packages were simply refused and returned to us.

For more than a year, one of our largest markets was closed. The United States is where many of my readers and collectors are, and not being able to reach them was one of the hardest parts of this past year.

So today I am happy to draw a line under it. We have found a new shipping partner that delivers to the United States, and we are open again, effective immediately. Delivery may take a little longer than you are used to, and I want to be honest about that, but the door is open and the packages are moving.

To celebrate, use the code WELCOMEBACK at checkout for 10% off anything in the shop. The offer runs for two weeks from today, wherever in the world you are.

You can find everything at 1605collective.com.

The books are here (https://1605collective.com/collections/books) and the stands are here (https://1605collective.com/pages/stands). If you are in the United States, you are welcome back, and if you have any questions about availability or shipping, you can reply directly to this email.

It is good to have you all here.

— Bastiaan

There is a moment, right before someone buys a piece of my work, when they go silent. They have stopped looking at the print and started looking at something behind it. I have learned to recognize that silence. It is the moment the real decision is made, and it has almost nothing to do with the image on the wall.

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I am in a rare position to see it. I make the work, and in my home market in the Netherlands the conversation is direct. I deal with collectors myself, through Studio Woudt. I write the emails. I hang the prints. I am in the room when they decide. Abroad I work with trusted galleries and partners who carry the work into their own regions, from the United States and the United Kingdom to Portugal, Berlin, and the Emirates. A good gallery does something I cannot. It places work in front of people I would never reach, and the best ones do it with real care. What I have that they do not is the other side of the table. I am also the person who made the thing being sold. So I see this from both ends.

And from that vantage point, one thing has become impossible to ignore. A collector does not buy an image. They buy a relationship with the way someone sees.

The art world rarely says this out loud, because it does not like to talk about money. There is an unwritten rule that the maker stays silent about value, as if naming it would cheapen the work. I think that silence does more harm than the honesty ever could.

So I want to do the opposite. Not with sales language, but with what I have actually seen. I want to show you why two prints that look identical can be worth completely different amounts. I want to tell you what changes in the room when a collector stops choosing with their eyes. And I want to hand you the one question that separates someone buying decoration from someone building a collection that will still mean something in twenty years.

This is the part that rarely gets said out loud, on either side of a sale. Here is what I see from the inside.

The object is the smallest part

On the surface, you buy an object. A print, a size, an edition number, a place on a wall. That part is real and I care about it deeply. How a work is printed, on what paper, in what light it will live, all of it matters. I have written before about why a physical print carries a weight a screen never will, in Printing Isn’t Dead. A photograph is only data until ink touches paper.

But the object is the smallest part of what you are paying for.

Why two identical prints are not worth the same

Here is something that sounds irrational until you have lived it. Two photographs can be technically identical, same paper, same size, same process, and carry completely different worth. The difference is history. One of them holds years inside it. The other does not.

Take Pyramid, a work I made in 2022 with Tinotenda Mushore. Tinotenda has been a central presence in my work for more than ten years. Our sessions unfold with very few words. Nothing is posed. The strongest images are not constructed, they are recognized, and that recognition only became possible after a decade of building trust.

When I sat down to write to the collector after the acquisition, I noticed something halfway through the letter. I was not describing a photograph at all. I was describing a relationship, a decade of it. That was the moment I understood what had actually changed hands. Not a striking composition, but ten years that cannot be bought back, repeated, or faked.

That is the part you cannot reproduce, because it was never manufactured in the first place. You are paying for time. For trust. For the soil the work grew from.

What happens in the room

This is why I decided to open my studio to collectors. Not as a showroom, but as a meeting. When someone visits Studio Woudt, I walk them through the work and tell them where each piece came from. And almost every time, the same thing happens. The work they arrived wanting is not the work they leave with. Somewhere in the conversation they stop choosing with their eyes and start choosing with something harder to name. They stop asking which piece fits the wall and start asking which piece means something to them.

That shift is the entire business. The silence I described at the start is that shift happening in real time. After it, the price is almost a formality. Recognition comes first. The money only follows.

The question I would ask you

So here is the question I would put to anyone who collects, and the one I promised you. Ask yourself whether you could explain why you own a piece without mentioning the room it hangs in.

If the only answer is that it fits the space, the colour, the wall, then you are buying decoration, and decoration gets replaced the moment the room changes. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not collecting. If you can talk about the work itself, why this image, why this maker, why it keeps holding your attention, then you are doing something close to what I do when I make it. You are choosing what deserves your attention, and what deserves to last.

A collector does not buy what I made. They buy why I made it, and the years it took to learn how. The print is the part you can hang on a wall.

Everything that gives it worth happened long before it reached you.

– Bastiaan

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In July last year I ended my representation in the Netherlands. Bildhalle, who had been showing my work in Amsterdam since 2020, still represents me in Switzerland. Mirjam and I parted on good terms, and I have nothing but warmth to say about how that conversation went. But for the country I actually live in, I made a different choice. I run the Dutch market myself, from my own studio in Alkmaar.

That structure has a name. Studio Woudt. This week, what it is, and why it exists.

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What it is

Studio Woudt is the direct channel for my fine art photography in the Netherlands. The place where collectors can see the work in person, acquire limited editions, commission unique projects, and walk through the rooms where the photographs are actually made. There is always a permanent exhibition on view. Visits are by appointment. No queue, no intermediary, just the work and the person who made it.

The studio itself is 1.200 square metres. Behind the gallery sit the archives, the sets, and the rooms where the work takes shape. When you visit, you are not in a white cube on a Dutch canal. You are in the building where the work begins.

For collectors outside the Netherlands, the structure is different. I work with trusted galleries in the United States, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Berlin, Paris, Australie and the Emirates to name a few. Each market with the right partner. But the country I live in, the country I work from, that one I run myself.

Not alone. Janneke Schrey runs sales and creative at Studio Woudt, and has been part of this practice for years. If I am not in the room, she is.

Why

The decision was not theatrical. It was structural.

A gallery, by design, divides its attention across many artists. That is the model. Sales pressure points toward whatever is moving fastest in any given month. Logical, fair, and effective at the scale of a portfolio. But for an artist who wants to show work permanently, who wants to host conversations that take more than a brief meeting, who wants to set the rhythm of new releases and the way each piece is introduced, the model has a ceiling.

There is a simpler version of the same thought. I did not want to be dependent on a single exhibition every other year in my own country. I wanted the work to be available, here, all the time, for anyone who finds it and wants to see it in person. And to keep working with the people who genuinely want to show it, here and elsewhere, so as many people as possible can encounter it. Permanent presence, not periodic visibility.

I had the space already. I had the production capacity, the infrastructure, the network. I had Janneke. After a few years inside the Dutch gallery system, the question became simple. If I could do this myself, why was I not?

So I am.

I wrote about the visitor side of this last November in Why I’m Opening My Studio to Collectors. What I want to write about here is the other side. The reason behind the structure.

Daniel Arsham, on audience

I have been reading Future Relic, Daniel Arsham’s book(AMAZING BOOK), this month. One passage in particular has been sitting with me. He is writing about the criticism he received for his commercial collaborations. Sneakers with Adidas. Jewelry with Tiffany. A car with Porsche. Clothes with Kith. The art world’s response, in his telling, was uniform. Why so commercial. Why diminish the work. Why your name on a billboard. His answer, every time, was one word: audience. In his own words:

“Those collaborations grow my audience. And they speak to normal people. That’s who I want to reach.” (Loc. 261)

I do not need to make sneakers to recognise the argument. What Arsham is naming is not really about brands or scale. It is about an assumption, still embedded in much of the art world, that the artist’s job is to wait quietly inside an institutional frame and let other people decide who the work is for. That is the part I disagree with too.

You need the art world. I do, completely. The galleries I work with internationally are part of the work, not separate from it. Museums, fairs, critics, curators, the whole infrastructure. That is how work travels and how it earns its place across decades. I am not walking away from any of that.

But the art world is one room. It is not the only room. And the question of which audience an artist reaches, on what terms, is not a fixed question with a single correct answer. Each artist gets to answer it for themselves. Arsham answered it through commercial collaborations. For the Netherlands, I am answering it through Studio Woudt.

Two freedoms

There are two words I keep returning to.

Freedom of enterprise. The right to design my own structure. To decide where the work hangs in my own country, and how it gets there. To set the rhythm. To carry the risk.

Freedom of artistry. The right to choose the conversation. To take the time the work needs without deferring to a calendar that belongs to a sales cycle. To let an exhibition stay open for six months because the work asks for it. To say no when a piece is not ready, and yes when it is.

These two are not separable for me. Studio Woudt exists so the work can stay artist-led at every step, from the print to the room it hangs in to the conversation that happens around it.

This is not a critique of the Dutch gallery system. There are excellent galleries here, run by people I respect, doing important work. It is a description of the role I want to occupy. Not the only role available. The one I am building.

None of this is solo work. I rely on every collaboration this practice has been built with, internationally and at home, in production, design, publishing, and inside the studio itself. I know what I cannot do alone, and I am grateful for the people who fill that gap. The point of autonomy is not independence from other people. The point is the ability to choose. What to make. Who to make it with. How to bring it into the room. That kind of choice, in my life and in my artistry, matters more than almost anything else.

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If you are nearby

If you are in the Netherlands, you are welcome. Studio Woudt is open by appointment in Alkmaar. Permanent exhibition on view. Full catalogue available to discuss in person. I am usually here. If I am not, Janneke is.

For an appointment, write to janneke@bastiaanwoudt.com, or reply to this email.

For what is currently up, studiowoudt.com.

That is what Studio Woudt is, and why it is here.

— Bastiaan

Studio Petit Oiseau, Paris. Set 3, January 2026. The first frame I exposed in colour in fifteen years was waiting for me on a stage Aymeric Arnould had built from scratch.

For fifteen years I have been a black and white photographer. Not by accident. By rule. Black and white is the medium I learned to see in. It strips a face down to its weight. It makes light obey.

Then Numéro asked.

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A door I had been circling

I had been interested in colour for a long time. Quietly, on the edges of my own practice. Tests that never quite landed. Frames that felt like a different photographer’s work the moment I looked at them. I never found my way in.

What changed was the invitation, and the team behind it.

Numéro 261 came with the frame I do not always have. Janneke Schrey as art director. Rebecca Bleynie on styling, the level you want around you when you are stepping into something for the first time. Aymeric Arnould as set designer, given the budget and the time to build the entire set from scratch. Maria Olsson on makeup. Olivier De Vriendt on hair. Those facts, the styling and the set most of all, did the real work in finding the palette.

For the first time, I thought: this is how we are going to do it, and we are going to try.

Two tones, no more

If I work in colour, I have one rule. It has to stay quiet.

Two tones in a frame. Maybe three. Reduced palettes, low saturation, tones pulled almost down to the value range I would print in black and white. The whole point is that someone seeing one of these images should still recognise it as mine. Same eye. Different light.

What I avoid is loud. No bright pink. No fire-engine red. No saturated yellow. The kind of colour that announces itself before the photograph does.

Aymeric and Rebecca understood this immediately. The set, the wardrobe, the makeup, the hair. All of it built around the principle that colour was a tone, not a statement. That is the only way I know how to do it.

Heather

I had been following Heather Kemesky for years before we ever stood in a studio together. Her work alone, and her work with Imre van Opstal, her partner. Imre is a Dutch choreographer and dancer, an associate at Nederlands Dans Theater, with her own creative practice alongside her brother Marne. The two of them as a couple in front of the camera, the Vogue Netherlands cover Cass Bird shot of them in 2024, the Byredo campaign, the quieter editorials in between, has been a thing I have followed closely. There is something rare about a couple who can hold a frame the way those two do, and I have admired it from a distance for a long time.

So getting Heather on this shoot was a moment for me. I want to say that clearly.

She is extraordinary in person. Her beauty has a quality I find hard to name and refuse to flatten into adjectives. There is just something there that other people do not have. The bones, the eyes, a presence that does not perform itself. The camera does not have to work for her. It gets to be there.

This series exists, in colour, because Heather made colour easy. I was the one stepping into a register I had been circling for fifteen years. She was the one giving me a face the register could rest on. That is not a small thing.

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Roberto Salbitani. The world as co-author

In March I went back to see Ettore Molinario at his Casa Museo in Milan. I wrote about that first visit last year, about how his collection holds work the market has mostly forgotten, and the way he talks about each photograph as if it were someone he personally knows. This time, one image stopped me cold.

It was a small black-and-white print by Roberto Salbitani. I do not know the title. I have not been able to find it online. But I have not stopped thinking about it.

Salbitani was born in Padua in 1945 and has lived in Rome for decades. He shoots black and white on film, develops his own negatives, prints his own work. The tones are dense, almost tarry. The blacks have weight. He has been doing this for over fifty years, mostly outside the gallery system, mostly on his own terms.

His best-known series is La città invasa (1972 to 1984): Italian cities photographed at the moment advertising, signage, and surveillance began to overrun public space. Other series, Il viaggiatore parallelo, Venezia. Circumnavigazioni e derive, Lune, Lettera dall’ex manicomio S. Giovanni di Trieste, extend the same instinct. A slow, attentive way of looking at how landscape and memory press against each other.

What stays with me is something he said in an interview last summer: “I consider the world the co-author of my images.” Not subject. Co-author. The world is doing half the work, and the photographer’s job is to listen carefully enough to recognise its half of the sentence.

That is a position that demands patience. It refuses the idea of the photographer as author-in-charge. And it sits close to what I wrote last month about niwaki and Sella’s archive. The idea that the work is already there, and the practice is in showing up to meet it.

Oliver Burkeman. Embrace your limitations

I read a lot about productivity. Not the LinkedIn version. The real version, the kind that asks what a finite life is actually for. As an artist working alone in the studio, that question is not academic. It is the work.

Meditations for Mortals is Oliver Burkeman’s follow-up to Four Thousand Weeks. Twenty-eight short chapters, one per day, for four weeks. Each chapter circles a single idea Burkeman calls imperfectionism: the recognition that you will never have time for everything, never be ready, never have the perfect conditions, and that this is not a problem to solve but the precondition for a real life.

He builds on Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, “thrownness”. The strange fact that you wake up inside a life you did not choose, with a personality you did not pick, and time flowing out from under you whether you notice it or not. The conclusion is not nihilistic. It is the opposite. If you cannot do everything, you may as well start now with the few things that count.

The line that stayed with me longest:

“Just doing something once today, just steering your kayak over the next few inches of water, is the only way you’ll ever become the kind of person who does that sort of thing on a regular basis. Otherwise you’re merely the kind of person who spends your life drawing up plans for how you’re going to become a different kind of person later on.” (Loc. 292)

That is the argument, in one sentence. The next few inches. Not the system. Not the routine. Not the version of yourself that will appear once the studio is finally organised.

Burkeman sits in good company on my shelf. Marcus Aurelius, whom I wrote about in December, is the older, sterner ancestor of this argument: you could leave life right now. Rick Rubin in The Creative Act makes the same case from inside the creative process. Trust the practice, not the plan. And David Lynch on meditation said it most simply: bait your hook and wait.

A serious recommendation. If you only read one book on time and finitude this year, read this one.

Irving Penn × Issey Miyake. Penn-san

I came across a piece in Aperture this week about Irving Penn and Issey Miyake. Two names that sit on the very shortest list of people who have shaped how I see. Penn comes up in every interview I have ever given when someone asks who taught me to look in black and white. Miyake has been my favourite fashion designer since I started paying attention to clothes at all.

For more than two decades they made work together. Miyake called Penn Penn-san. They met in Tokyo over dinner, introduced by the publisher Nicholas Callaway. In 1986 Penn began shooting Miyake’s seasonal collections in New York, and here is the part that stopped me cold. Miyake insisted Penn be unhindered. He absented himself from the New York shoots. Penn would sit at a table with a pencil and paper, sketch as the models were directed, take Polaroids, then shoot. After each session, the transparencies flew to Tokyo, where Miyake used them as the springboard for his next collection.

That is the structure of a real creative dialogue. Not approval. Not art direction. Trust.

The first time Miyake saw what Penn had done with his clothes, a 1983 editorial for American Vogue, he said: “Wow! I never thought of looking at clothes in that way! The clothes have been given a voice of their own!” Years later, in the catalogue Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (1997), Miyake wrote that without Penn-san’s eye he could not have continued to find new themes to challenge himself. Penn’s images directly fed the invention of Pleats Please. Editor Mark Holborn put it best, in the photobook Irving Penn Regards the Work of Issey Miyake (1999): “the work of one provides a mirror for the work of the other.”

I wrote last week about why brands hire my eye, about being an artist first inside a fashion frame. Penn × Miyake is the Platonic ideal of that exchange. The designer who understands that an outside eye, given full freedom, can mirror back what you were already subconsciously trying to capture. That is not a service. That is a sounding board. Or, in Miyake’s own closing words: “One always needs someone who can look over one’s shoulder and evaluate one’s work from a detached and objective point of view, someone who can act as a sounding board.”

Elon Musk. The limit is mostly mental

A strange guest on this list, I know. But this month I listened to a Modern Wisdom episode, Eric Jorgenson on The Wild Psychology of Elon Musk, and I could not put it down.

Musk is controversial. I do not need to explain that. But for me he is also the genius of our time. And the part that lands hardest as an artist is how he thinks, not what he thinks.

After PayPal, Musk had roughly two hundred million dollars to spend. Instead of doing something safe, he decided that the space programme had to change. Better. Cheaper. More human in ambition. He almost started as a philanthropist. Not with a finished plan, but with a statement: I want to build a rocket. I want to learn how this works. I want to put a small plant on Mars.

What follows is the part I cannot let go of. Saturday sessions with rocket scientists. Back to first principles. Every assumption pulled apart. How can this be better? How can this be cheaper? SpaceX did not become an idea. It became a system. A movement. Proof that most limits are mental limits.

I do not work with rockets. I work with light and black and white. The lesson translates anyway. If you take a problem big enough and stay inside it long enough, you can rewrite the rules. Not by talking about possibilities, but by picking one problem and standing inside it.

That is the same engine Burkeman described a few paragraphs back, only at a different speed. Burkeman says do one thing today. Musk says do the one thing today that everyone says cannot be done. Both true. Both needed.

Not art. Inspiration. And sometimes that is enough.

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What stays with me, looking at all four together, is one small thing. None of them tries to do the work alone. Salbitani makes room for the world. Burkeman makes room for time. Miyake made room for Penn-san for two decades. Musk makes room for a problem big enough to argue back.

A bigger room, in four different ways. That is what April taught me.

— Bastiaan

Every so often, though, a brief lands on my desk that I did not write. A list of things that have to be visible. A product, a model, a magazine, a logo. Constraints I would never have chosen on my own. And the work that comes out of those days, more often than I expected when I started saying yes to it, ends up sharper than I thought it could be.

The clearest example I can give comes from the first time I shot for Dior Magazine.

On paper, the brief should have made the work impossible. Photograph the models in my own recognisable style. Black and white, silhouettes, anonymity, light and shadow, the work I had built my name on. But the jewellery had to be visible. In colour. The difference between gold and silver had to read clearly. The reflections had to behave. The light had to flatter the stones. And inside the same frames, the model still had to belong to Dior. Recognisable enough to be theirs. Anonymous enough to be mine.

I had never worked like that before.

But the work itself was never going to be anything other than mine. I am an artist. That is the first line of my biography and the last note of every shoot. The pictures I am known for, the ones that hang in galleries and live in books, come from a particular way of seeing. Black and white. Silhouette. A figure half lost in shadow. Dior knew that when they called. They did not hire me to make jewellery photography. They hired me to make my photography, and they trusted that the jewellery would find its place inside it.

The image you see is the image we shot. The portraits were made the way I always make them. The extra layer was the jewellery: photographed separately as well, lit from every side, so the reflections could land correctly and the stones could be brought to their best in post. Technically demanding photography on top of the work I usually do.

I left that shoot with images I am proud of. Not despite the constraints. Because of them.

I have been thinking about why for a long time. Why the cleanest work, more often than not, comes from the most defined conditions. Why a brief I did not write often takes me further than a day in the studio with no agenda at all. And why, after years of working both ways, I have stopped treating the two as opposites.

There is something specific I learned on that first Dior set, and on every set since, that I want to leave with you in this essay. How to keep your own eye intact inside someone else’s frame. What a client is actually buying when they hire an artist. The exact place where most makers lose themselves on commission, and the small refusal that prevents it. That last part is what I would tell a younger photographer if they asked me how to do this work without disappearing into it.

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The answer, almost always, is no one. Cities are designed every day, by policy, by budgets, by regulations, by speed. What they are rarely designed by is a single, long-term visual mind.

In film, this would be unthinkable. A production without an art director results in visual noise. Too many ideas, no hierarchy, no rhythm. So why do we accept this for the places we live in?

As a visually driven person, I believe every major city needs an art director. Not a decorator. Not someone chasing trends. But a role with responsibility for visual coherence, material honesty, light, proportion, and restraint. Someone who thinks in decades instead of election cycles.

My eye is trained to see cities as compositions. Light, proportion, material, the relationship between one surface and the next. Some cities hold together. Others fall apart the moment you look past the postcard.

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Bruno Munari, an Italian artist and designer who spent his career questioning the line between art and everyday life, wrote in his 1966 book Design as Art that design is “planning as objectively as possible of everything that goes to make up the surroundings and atmosphere in which men live today. This atmosphere is created by all the objects produced by industry, from glasses to houses and even cities.” He wrote that nearly sixty years ago. The observation has only become more urgent.

An art director of a city would not design every building. They would define the language. They would ask simple questions. Does this belong here? Does it age well? Does it respect what already exists? Is silence sometimes better than expression?

I think about Eduardo Chillida often. He was a Basque sculptor who studied architecture in Madrid and briefly played goalkeeper for Real Sociedad before turning to art full-time. That combination of architecture, physicality, and the instinct to defend a space runs through everything he ever made. In a conversation I referenced in Slow space, fast matter, he gestured through the air and said: “This is a quick space.” Then he patted a rusted steel sculpture: “And this is a slower space.” Matter is slow, heavy space. Space is fast, light matter. The two are not opposites. They are two states of the same thing.

Cities work the same way. A building is slow space. The street between two buildings is fast space. When both are considered together, something emerges that neither could produce alone. When they are not, you get noise. Visual noise. The kind that tires you without you realizing why.

In that same piece, I wrote about niwaki, the Japanese art of cloud pruning. A pruner works over decades, removing living branches. Not the dead ones. The ones that pull attention away from the tree’s essential form. The shape is already in the tree. The work is in uncovering it. A city art director would do the same. Not adding. Revealing. Protecting what is already there and making sure what comes next does not erase it.

This is not about control. It is about care.

The fear is obvious. One taste, imposed on millions. But good art direction is never about ego. It is about creating a framework in which many voices can exist without cancelling each other out. Not dictating what gets built, but shaping the board on which everyone else plays. I once wrote about that idea in the context of AI and art: that the tool is not the artist, it is the surface that makes the game possible. The same applies to a city. The art director does not make the moves. They define the field.

That kind of attention is rare in how cities are built. Plans are made, renderings are approved, construction begins. But attention, real attention, the kind that asks whether something belongs before it is placed, is almost never part of the process. I noticed this when I traveled through Morocco for Karawan. I arrived without a plan, and the absence of expectation forced me to look. The strongest images came not from searching, but from paying attention to what was already there. Cities could use that same instinct. Not more planning. More looking.

Think of the cities that stay with you. New York, Paris, Tokyo, Kyoto. Each has a strong visual identity, often by accident, history, or sheer repetition. Imagine if that identity was consciously protected and refined, instead of slowly eroded by four-year election cycles and developers chasing the fastest return.

Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, a neuroarts researcher and a design executive at Google, describe in Your Brain on Art that people with an aesthetic mindset share four attributes: a high level of curiosity, a love of open-ended exploration, keen sensory awareness, and a drive to engage in creative activities. These are the qualities you would want in someone responsible for how a city looks and feels. Not a politician. Not a developer. Someone who sees.

Imagine the job title. Art Director of Amsterdam. Art Director of New York City. Art Director of Dubai. Not fantasy roles but serious public positions. Long-term appointments. Independent from short-term politics. Accountable to the city itself.

The benefits go beyond beauty. People take better care of places that feel intentional. A city with visual clarity creates mental calm. A shared aesthetic language builds pride and belonging. We often speak about sustainability in terms of energy and materials. Rarely in terms of visual sustainability. How long something remains meaningful before it is replaced.

Maybe the question is not whether every city needs an art director. Maybe the real question is this: can we still afford cities without one?

— Bastiaan

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Studio Notes: Conversations is a podcast shaped by curiosity. Each episode is a one-to-one conversation with someone whose work or way of seeing the world holds my attention. The guests come from different fields: art, music, neuroscience, architecture, design. The format is simple. Two people, one conversation, no script. I listen more than I lead. Some episodes are in English, others in Dutch. Every conversation comes with written summaries in both languages.

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A note on language: this episode is in Dutch. I deliberately choose to speak with each guest in their native language. Mick is Dutch, so we spoke Dutch. For my English-speaking readers: my apologies. You will find a full written summary in English below, and future episodes will alternate between the two languages.

This time I sit down with Mick Nieuwenhuis, founder of Newhouse Gallery in Amsterdam. Mick studied media, spent time in New York, went to the fashion academy in Antwerp, and launched a custom lingerie brand. Then came a burn-out. And then, almost by accident, art. First as an assistant to one artist. Then as an agent for several. Then on the floor of her first art fair, where people were pulling at her sleeve to buy work. Two years later, she opened her own gallery on the Jodenbreestraat.

Newhouse is not a white cube. It is closer to a curated living room, where art, collectible design, and fashion meet. Mick’s team comes from fashion. Her references come from fashion. Her way of building a brand around a gallery comes from fashion. And that difference is what makes Newhouse one of the most talked about young galleries in the Netherlands.

In the episode we talk about:

• From lingerie brand to burn-out to gallery: how curiosity and saying yes shaped her career

• Why her first art fair made everything click, and why others almost made her quit

• The 50/50 commission model, and how she started by doing it differently

• How she turned a booth at Big Art into an immersive world: totem poles, wood chips, red light, and a smoke machine

• A salon de rentrée in her own apartment during Amsterdam Art Week

• The Hubba Bubba Building in Zandvoort: a villa covered in bubblegum balls, listed for sale through the gallery. You buy the artwork. The house comes with it

• What the art world can learn from the fashion industry

• The physical experience of art vs. screens: “A work should never be backlit”

• Where the gallery world is heading: smaller fairs, more intimacy, fewer white walls

• Her dreams: Art Basel, Design Miami, presence in New York and Paris, and her own museum at 65

We also traded work. I gave her a piece, she gave me a sculpture by Camille de Prêtre. It is in the gallery now and it belongs here.

Listen now on Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Summary (English)

Mick Nieuwenhuis never set out to open a gallery. She studied media, spent time in New York, trained at the fashion academy in Antwerp, and ended up building a custom lingerie brand called Maison Nouvelle. Customers could design their own sets: straps, lace, colours, hooks. The brand grew, moved into retail, and then around 2020 it all became too much. She burned out and walked away from everything she had built.

What happened next was not a career change. It was more like a slow slide into something she did not see coming. She met an artist and started helping out. Other artists noticed and asked for the same thing. Before she knew it, she was representing a handful of mostly female artists and taking them to fairs she had never attended herself. Her first was PAN Amsterdam. People were grabbing her sleeve to buy work. She had no experience and no plan, but something clicked. Not every fair that followed confirmed the feeling. Some nearly made her quit. But the momentum was stronger than the doubt, and in September 2024, she opened Newhouse Gallery on the Jodenbreestraat in Amsterdam.

This conversation was recorded in my studio, and what struck me from the beginning is how differently Mick thinks about what a gallery can be. Newhouse is not a white cube. She calls it a curated living room. Paintings hang next to collectible design objects, vintage furniture sits alongside fashion pieces, and glass handbags by designer Tess van Zalinge are presented as gallery works. Her entire team comes from fashion, not from art, and that background runs through everything: the branding, the way exhibitions are staged, the instinct to think in terms of experience rather than display.

We spent a good part of the conversation on the business side. Mick started by doing things differently from most galleries, rejecting the standard 50/50 commission split in favour of a model where artists covered their own booth costs and she took a smaller percentage. It was closer to an agency than a gallery. Over time she moved toward the traditional structure, not because the old way was wrong, but because she realized she needed creative control over how the work was shown. That shift is telling. It is not really about money. It is about being able to shape the world around the work.

And she takes that literally. At Big Art, she transformed a booth into a forest of totem poles by Santiago Pani. The floor was covered in wood chips, red light hung overhead, and a smoke machine filled the space. The concept drew on Kami, the Japanese belief that spirits inhabit all things. Right next to it, Sandra K. Planken had built an underwater world from textile and glass, with coral reef sounds playing through hidden speakers. These were not booths with art on the walls. They were environments you stepped into, places that changed the way you looked at what was inside them.

Another story that stayed with me was the Hubba Bubba Building in Zandvoort: a villa that street artist Frankey covered entirely in pink bubblegum balls, a giant figure blowing them from the chimney. Mick listed it for sale through the gallery. The concept is simple: you buy the artwork, the house comes with it.

Accessibility came up repeatedly. Mick’s starting price is 590 euros. She told me about a seventeen-year-old girl who saved up for months and came to a fair specifically to buy one piece. That image stayed with me longer than any gallery statement I have ever read. When people walk in and say they do not know anything about art, Mick tells them: neither do I. There is no jargon at Newhouse, no velvet rope. During Amsterdam Art Week she hosted a salon de rentrée in her own apartment. Visitors had to email for the address. It ended up busier than most gallery openings. People sat at her kitchen table with wine, and the conversations that followed were nothing like what happens in a white-walled room with track lighting.

We talked about where the gallery world is heading and whether the traditional model still makes sense. Mick does not believe in fixed hours or permanent spaces for the sake of permanence. She believes in momentum: pop-ups, dinners, travelling shows, events that light up and then disappear. She mentioned two guys in New York who park a U-Haul truck outside an art fair and open the back as a gallery. That kind of guerrilla energy is what she thinks the industry needs more of, and I agree. There are too many fairs and most of them follow the same formula. The ones that stand out build an experience. The rest hang work on walls and wait. After four consecutive weekends of fairs, Mick knows this from the inside.

Towards the end we got into the question of physical versus digital. Mick is unequivocal: a work of art should never be backlit. She wants to light it, not screen it. She has a Samsung Frame at home and uses it only for television. When it is off, she puts it behind the couch. She represents photographers like Lotte Ekkel and Nanda Hagenaars, and she always emphasizes that their work is made in camera, without digital manipulation. She is open to AI-generated art in principle, but it has not connected with her yet.

Her ambitions are clear. Art Basel. Design Miami. A presence that moves between Amsterdam, New York, and Paris. And at sixty-five, her own museum. She visited Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Venice and decided on the spot: that is the direction.

At the end of our conversation, we exchanged work. I gave her a piece. She gave me a sculpture by Camille de Prêtre. It sits in the gallery now. It belongs there.

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Four things that stayed with me this month. None of them are connected. Except they are.

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Rick Owens Furniture

Rick Owens started in fashion. Draped fabrics, elongated silhouettes, a world built on the body. But at some point he moved to stone. Alabaster. Plywood. Black marble. And the objects he makes now look nothing like furniture.

A bench that could be a sarcophagus. A table that could be an altar. There is no gesture toward comfort. No cushion, no curve to welcome you. These are objects that refuse to explain themselves. And that refusal is what makes them impossible to ignore.

What Owens does is strip a form down until only its weight remains. No decoration. No reference to domesticity. Just mass, material, and silence. His furniture page reads like a gallery of monoliths — pieces that exist somewhere between sculpture and architecture, between function and confrontation.

There is a word for this approach: honesty. The material is what it is. The form is what it is. Nothing hides behind a finish or a clever detail. I wrote about Studio STRAF in December — a studio in Antwerp built on the same principle. And Glenn Sestig, whose work I mentioned last month, operates in the same register. These are people who trust their material enough to leave it alone.

Owens once said he wants his objects to look like they already existed and he just found them. That might be the most precise description of creative restraint I have heard.

Cloud Pruning

Niwaki is the Japanese art of training trees. Not into topiary shapes. Not hedges trimmed to look like animals or geometric forms. Niwaki is about revealing a tree’s essential structure by removing everything that obscures it.

The pruner works over years. Sometimes decades. Each season, a few branches are removed. Not the dead ones. The living ones that pull attention away from the core form. The goal is not to impose a shape. The shape is already in the tree. The work is in uncovering it.

What makes this fascinating is the patience. A niwaki master does not finish a tree. The tree is never finished. It is an ongoing negotiation between growth and restraint, between what the tree wants to become and what the pruner sees it could be.

Rick Rubin talks about something similar when he describes the creative process as receiving rather than manufacturing. The idea that the work already exists somewhere and your job is to clear the path toward it. Cloud pruning makes that idea physical. You can stand in front of it and see what decades of careful removal look like.

There is a lesson in that for anyone who edits. Photographs, text, music, film. The best edit is not the cleverest cut. It is the one that reveals what was already true.

Eduardo Chillida — Médecins du Monde

In 1992, Eduardo Chillida made a print for Médecins du Monde. Doctors of the World. The French humanitarian medical network founded in 1980 that now operates in over 70 countries, providing care in conflict zones, refugee camps, and communities where health systems have collapsed. For their cause, Chillida made an etching with embossing. Black ink on white paper. A form that seems to both hold and release space at the same time.

It is a large work. 120 by 160 centimeters. And it stopped me completely.

Chillida was Basque. He studied architecture in Madrid, then briefly played goalkeeper for Real Sociedad before turning to art full-time. That combination of architecture, physicality, and the instinct to defend a space runs through everything he ever made.

He spent his life exploring one question: what is the relationship between mass and void? Not as opposites, but as two states of the same thing. In a 1986 interview with the LA Times, he gestured through the air and said: “This is a quick space.” Then he patted a rusted steel sculpture: “And this is a slower space.” In their teachers’ notes on Chillida, Hauser & Wirth summarize his philosophy: “Matter is slow, heavy space, and space is fast, light matter.”

That reframes everything. The black forms in the Médecins du Monde print are not sitting on white paper. They are creating the white space around them. The void is not absence. It is the other half of the form.

For anyone who works in black and white, in any medium. This hits close. What you leave out is not empty. It is active. It is doing as much work as the darkest mark on the page. Olafur Eliasson reduces experiences to their essential elements. Chillida does something similar, but with more gravity. Literally. His sculptures weigh tons. And yet they feel like they are about air.

Vittorio Sella — The Shot of Time

In 1882, a 23-year-old Italian made the first winter ascent of the Matterhorn. He carried a large-format camera with him. The plates were up to 30×40 centimeters. The conditions were brutal. The photographs were extraordinary.

His name was Vittorio Sella. Over the next four decades, he would photograph mountains on five continents: the Caucasus, Alaska, the Himalayas, the Karakoram, the Ruwenzori in East Africa. Always with the same commitment to large-format precision under impossible circumstances.

Ansel Adams, no stranger to mountains himself, wrote about Sella in 1946: “A reverent and intelligent artist.” He described being “amazed by the mood of calmness and perfection pervading all of Sella’s photographs.” Calmness. Made at altitude. In freezing temperatures. With glass plates.

But the real story is what happened after. The Fondazione Sella in Biella, Italy, now holds approximately one million photographs. Glass plates, prints, negatives. An entire lifetime of looking, preserved in wooden drawers and climate-controlled rooms. Photographer Giulio Favotto was invited to photograph the archive itself for a new book: The Shot of Time: Vittorio Sella, the Photographer and His Archive. I came across it at the MIA Photo Fair in Milan this March and spent a while talking with Favotto about the project. That conversation stayed with me longer than most things at the fair.

What he captured is not the spectacular mountain images. It is the infrastructure. The shelves, the containers, the physical weight of a practice sustained over an entire life. And that might be more powerful than any single summit photograph. Because it shows what commitment actually looks like when the cameras are off and the expeditions are over.

There is something Frederick Buyckx understood too, with Horse Head. The idea that a body of work only becomes what it is through years of returning. Sella returned to the mountains for forty years. The archive is proof.

A furniture maker who strips every unnecessary line. A gardener who reveals a tree by taking branches away. A sculptor who treated void as material. A photographer whose archive outlived him by a century.

Four different disciplines. One shared instinct: the power is not in what you add. It is in what you sustain, refine, and, in the right places, remove.

— Bastiaan

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I have spent years building systems to hold on to what passes through. Notebooks, daily logs, archives of references and highlights. They work, to a point. But the images I am most proud of did not come from any system. They came from something I could not hold on to.

Rick Rubin writes in The Creative Act: “We begin with everything: everything seen, everything done, everything thought, everything felt, everything imagined, everything forgotten.” The word that stays with me is forgotten. Not remembered. Not archived. Forgotten.

I think the strongest work does not come from what you planned to capture. It comes from what you could not forget. And two years ago, something happened that proved it.

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Here is what stayed with me.

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Glenn Sestig — The Stuff That Surrounds

The Wallpaper\ series The Stuff That Surrounds* visited Belgian architect Glenn Sestig in his home in Ghent — a brutalist house designed by Ivan Van Mossevelde in 1972, bought and restored by Sestig in 2017. What you see inside is not decoration. Every object is a position. Materials are chosen the way you choose words: precisely, without excess.

What struck me is how the house is an extension of his practice. Not a showroom. A way of living that follows the same logic as the work. Architecture, design, and daily life treated as one continuous sentence.

I noticed the same thing last December when I wrote about Studio STRAF — that restraint is not a style, it is a mindset. Sestig takes it one step further: he lives inside it.

Watch on YouTube

Paul Rosolie — Mother of God

Paul Rosolie was eighteen when he first walked alone into the Madre de Dios region of Peru — one of the most biodiverse and inaccessible places on Earth. Mother of God is the book that came out of years of returning. Giant anacondas, isolated tribes, jaguars, gold miners, and a forest that keeps most people out.

What I took from this book is not the adventure. It is the commitment behind it. Rosolie did not visit once. He kept going back. He learned the jungle on its own terms, not his. That is a different kind of discipline — not the discipline of control, but the discipline of surrender.

It reminded me of what I wrote in the Deep Dive on Karawan earlier this year: the places that change you are the ones you return to. You do not take them. They take you, slowly, over time.

Jane Goodall called it “an extraordinary book.” I would not argue with that.

Find it on Goodreads

Ikkō Narahara

I found Narahara through a video by the channel Developing Tank, and I have not been able to stop thinking about him since. He was born in Japan in 1931, co-founded the photography collective VIVO in 1957, and spent the next six decades photographing prisons, monasteries, Venice, the American Southwest, Apollo launches, and eventually the inside of his own body using X-rays and isotope photography.

What defines his work is not a subject but a question: what does photography have to do with time, with death, and with the experience of being alive? Each project was a different attempt at the same answer. He wrote once that photographs carry within themselves “a nostalgia for cosmic memories.”

That sentence has been with me for weeks. It connects to something I have been thinking about with HENRO — how a pilgrimage route in Japan became not just a project, but a reckoning with time. Narahara spent his entire career asking the same thing with a camera. That kind of consistency feels rare.

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Jared Thomas Tapy — Why Curiosity Is the Most Important Skill Set

The Creative Connection

Why Curiosity Is the Most Important Skill Set

Curiosity didn’t vanish in a blaze of controversy or get publicly canceled in a comment section. It didn’t go out swinging. It just… stopped showing up. Quietly. Politely. Like someone who realized halfway through the party that no one was actually listening anymore. One day it was there, asking inconvenient questions, slowing things down, making everyo…

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4 months ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Jared Thomas Tapy

I write about curiosity often. I explored it in The Shape of Curiosity and in conversations and in how I try to structure my days. If I had to name the single most important character trait for a creative person — not talent, not discipline, not vision — it would be curiosity.

So when I came across this essay by in his Substack The Creative Connection, it felt like reading something I had been trying to say for years. His argument is that curiosity is not a personality trait. It is a discipline — something you practice, protect, and develop deliberately. And that the online economy is systematically destroying it: rewarding certainty, speed, and repetition while leaving no room for genuine exploration or doubt.

I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Read the essay

Frederik Buyckx — Horse Head

Horse Head is a photobook by Belgian photographer Frederik Buyckx, documenting the lives of semi-nomadic herders in Kyrgyzstan. He made seven trips across three years. He rode with the herders on horseback. He built a quiet relationship without sharing a language. He photographed people living at altitude, in deep winter, in near-total isolation — and he did it without captions, without explanation.

The book demands that you learn to look. Black-and-white, slow, cold, and honest. Bichromy printing, Swiss binding, deliberate pacing. Nothing is rushed. Everything earns its place.

What I recognize in Buyckx’s approach is what I wrote about Stephan Vanfleteren last December: “This is not a fleeting idea. It is work that demanded time, and time was given.” Horse Head is the same conviction, in a different landscape. And it rhymes with Rosolie’s Amazon, and with Narahara’s decades-long meditation on the same questions. Some things only reveal themselves to those who keep showing up.

Find it at Hannibal Books

Five things that have stayed with me this month. Each one, in its own way, about going further than planned and staying longer than expected.

What has stayed with you? I would love to hear.

More soon.

— Bastiaan

If you want to go deeper into the thinking behind the work — the process, the doubt, the choices — that conversation continues in the paid edition.

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Books will ship out as of Monday the 30th

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In March 2024, my brother and I travelled to Shikoku, Japan. We brought bicycles and cameras. We did not bring a plan.

Shikoku is home to one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in the world — 88 Buddhist temples connected by more than 1,200 kilometres of mountain roads, forest paths, and coastal stretches. The route has been walked since 815. People keep returning to it, looking for something they cannot name in advance.

PREORDER HERE

We were not pilgrims in the traditional sense. But somewhere along the way, the journey became something I had not expected. A rhythm took hold — wake, pack, move, arrive, rest, repeat. In that rhythm, my usual way of seeing stopped working. The instincts I had built over years felt like the wrong instrument for this particular road.

Something shifted around the halfway point. I started looking differently. Not at the obvious. Not at the decisive moment. At what was just before or just after it. The images that came back are fragments. More like memory than fact.

The book collects this work and it will be presented at the opening on March 27 — the first time this project is shown publicly.

PREORDER HERE

Opening & Book Launch — Friday, March 27

16:00–19:00 · Official moment: 17:00

Hazenkoog 9 · 1822 BS Alkmaar, Netherlands

RSVP is still open. [Reserve your spot →] RSVP

The exhibition will remain on view in my studio in the days that follow. If you cannot make the opening, you are welcome to visit during one of the viewing moments below. Registration is required for all dates.

Weekend viewing — Saturday March 28 & Sunday March 29

Sat 11:00–15:00 · Sun 13:00–17:00

[Register →] RSVP

Week viewing — March 31 to April 3

Daily 13:00–17:00

[Register →] RSVP

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Ritual of Shapes — Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona

The exhibition at Alzueta Gallery closed on March 7. I want to say something about the response it received: the warmth and attention from visitors and collectors in Spain meant more than I expected.

I also want to acknowledge the gallery team specifically. The way they work is rare — professional, attentive, and genuinely caring. It made the whole experience of showing work there a good one.

For collectors in Spain who are interested in the work or have questions about availability:

Alzueta Gallery Barcelona Turó

C/ Josep Bertrand, 3 — 08021 Barcelona

alzuetagallery.com

Mon–Fri: 9:00–14:00 and 16:00–19:00

MC2 Gallery at MIA Photo Fair, Milan

From March 19 to 22, I will be showing work at MIA Photo Fair BNP Paribas in Milan, together with MC2 Gallery. This is the fair’s 15th edition — Italy’s most important fair for fine art photography. The theme this year is Metamorphosis.

We are in the Main Section, Stand E 022, at Superstudio Più, Via Tortona 27.

This is my second collaboration with MC2, following our debut at ArtVerona last October. The gallery, founded in Milan in 2009, works at the intersection of historical and contemporary photography. I’m looking forward to being in Italy and to showing the work in this context.

If you are in Milan that week, you are welcome. For enquiries please contact vincenzo.maccarone@mc2.gallery

HENRO — Studio Woudt, Alkmaar

On March 27, the first exhibition of HENRO opens at my studio and gallery in Alkmaar. The opening also marks the release of the book, published by 1605 Collective.

HENRO began as a journey. In March 2024, my brother and I cycled the Shikoku Henro pilgrimage route in Japan — more than 1,200 kilometres, 88 Buddhist temples, through mountains, forests, and coastal roads. The images that came out of that journey are not documentation. They are fragments: closer to memory than to record.

The book will be available online shortly after the opening.

You are welcome to join on one of the following dates. Each session is by RSVP.

Friday, March 27 — Opening & Book Launch

16:00–19:00 · Official moment: 17:00

RSVP →

Weekend viewing — Saturday March 28 & Sunday March 29

Sat 11:00–15:00 · Sun 13:00–17:00

RSVP →

Week viewing — March 31 to April 3

Daily 13:00–17:00

RSVP →

After these dates, the exhibition can be visited by appointment until October. Contact Janneke at janneke@bastiaanwoudt.com.

If this resonated, feel free to pass it along.

His passing came after a very short and intense period. Sudden in its speed. Heavy in its impact.

His name was Jelmar van Belle.

If there is such a thing as a soul companion, he was that. We traveled the world together. We shared a craft — me as a photographer, he as a filmmaker. But beyond the work, beyond the images and the films, he was simply a beautiful human being. Always calm. Always thoughtful. Always positive in a way that was contagious without ever being loud.

On the invitation to his farewell, someone wrote words I want to quote here:

“Jelmar, a storyteller, a connoisseur, always caring for others. He knew when to wait, when to move, and when to stay, until the light faded.”

That describes him better than I ever could.

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We first worked together in Paris. Then New York. Then Morocco — two weeks in a car together, driving from Marrakesh through the High Atlas into the Sahara. He filmed everything. Not just the landscapes or the photographs I was making, but the doubt, the frustration, the moments where it wasn’t working and I didn’t know why. He had an instinct for what was real. He never imposed a story. He waited for one to appear.

The film he made from that trip is one of the most honest documents of how I work. You can watch it here. It’s his film, not mine. That’s how I still think of it.

Over the years he made many more films — about my studio, my process, the world I work in. They live here. When I watch them now, I hear his thinking in every edit, every cut, every choice about what to leave in and what to let go. If you want to see the full breadth of what he made, his work is at jelmarvanbelle.nl.

In 2020 we sat down together for a podcast conversation. We talked about how we met, about the Morocco trip, about what it means to make work that feels like your own. But the part I keep returning to now is when he talked about his illness.

He had leukemia at fourteen. Twice. An anonymous bone marrow donor saved his life. And from that point on, he said, everything felt like bonus time. He was working on a personal documentary — about gratitude, about the search for the person who gave him those extra years. He wanted to make a film about what it feels like to owe your life to a stranger you will never know.

He never got to finish it.

I think of the two weeks we spent driving through California. Ten hours a day in the same car. Not a single moment of awkward silence. Only exchange. Only curiosity. Only presence.

That is rare. Genuinely rare.

For ten years I had the privilege of calling him my friend. I will carry our adventures and our conversations with me for the rest of my life. I will miss him for the rest of my life.

And yet — somewhere beyond this visible world — I am certain our paths will cross again. In another life. In another moment. In another place.

My heart goes out to his dear girlfriend Maaike, to his family, his parents and brothers, and to everyone who stood close to him, or whose path he crossed.

Rest in peace, my friend.

@jelmarvanbelle — 05-12-1984 – 20-02-2026

It is subtle. I still do my work. I still make decisions. But something shifts. I am not just making images. I am also showing that I am making images. There is a performance layered into the process, and it feels so natural that I almost do not notice it.

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On my own set, with no one around, the experience is different. There is no room to perform for. There is only the frame, the light, and whatever is unfolding in front of me. My attention moves differently. It stays closer. It does not bounce between what I see and how I might be seen.

I do not think the images suffer on a larger set. The work still holds. But the space inside my head is different. And over time, I have started to pay attention to that difference.

There is a distinction between self-awareness and self-consciousness that I think about often. They sound similar. They are not.

Self-awareness means noticing what is happening inside you while you work. Doubt showing up. Ambition pulling you forward. Fear slowing you down. Intuition pointing somewhere you did not plan to go. You observe these things without correcting them. You let them be. And from that openness, work can emerge that is honest, because it does not need to prove anything. It is allowed to simply exist.

Self-consciousness is different. It places an audience inside your mind before anyone has seen the work. You feel watched while you are still in the act of making. The focus shifts from what you are exploring to how it might be received. You start editing yourself too early. Not because the direction is wrong, but because it might be misunderstood. The work becomes a reaction instead of an action.

What follows is a deeper, more personal reflection on both states and what they ask of you as a maker. This section is available to paid subscribers.

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If you’d like to be there: you’re welcome. Attendance requires an RSVP — see below.

Hazenkoog 9 · 1822 BS Alkmaar

In March 2024, my brother and I travelled to the Japanese island of Shikoku. We brought our bicycles and cameras. We did not bring a plan.

Shikoku is home to one of the oldest pilgrimage routes in the world — the Henro. A path connecting 88 Buddhist temples across mountains, forests, and coastal roads. More than 1,200 kilometres. The route was first walked by the Buddhist priest Kūkai in 815. Since then, people have been returning to it, in search of something they can rarely name in advance.

We were not pilgrims in the traditional sense. But somewhere along the way, the journey became something I had not expected. Not a trip. Not a project. A practice.

The days started to look the same. Wake. Pack. Move. Arrive. Rest. Repeat. In that rhythm, something cleared — and the camera became harder to use. Not technically. But the usual way of seeing stopped working. The instincts I had built over years felt like the wrong tool for this particular road.

Somewhere around the halfway point, something shifted. I started looking differently. Not at the obvious. Not at the moment. At what was just before or just after it. That change followed me into the edit. Images I would have dismissed, I kept. Images I would have chosen, I let go.

What came back is not what I would have made before this journey. It is a different visual language — a new way of presenting work, and a new approach to editions and pricing. The images are fragments. More like memory than fact. Like something that happened just before waking up.

The works are printed using piezography on Japanese paper — Haini Kozo and Awagami. Each in a limited edition of 7.

The book HENRO, published by 1605 Collective, will be presented on the opening evening. Pre-order opens on 20 March — more on that in a separate newsletter coming soon.

Friday, March 27 — Opening & Book Launch

16:00–19:00 · Official moment: 17:00

RSVP →

Weekend viewing — Saturday March 28 & Sunday March 29

Sat 11:00–15:00 · Sun 13:00–17:00

RSVP →

Week viewing — March 31 to April 3

Daily 13:00–17:00

RSVP →

I look forward to welcoming you.

— Bastiaan

The first five questions are available to everyone. The full set of ten questions and answers is reserved for paid subscribers. I hope this format provides an open glimpse as well as a deeper layer for those who want to explore further.

1. What is your favorite camera and lens for your work?

My favorite camera brand is Fujifilm. I switched to Fujifilm when they released the GFX, a medium-format camera that met my needs perfectly and delivered the same quality I had experienced with my Phase One system.

In terms of focal length, I mostly work with 80mm and 120mm lenses in medium format.

2. Why do you do what you do?

Creating images and being creative every day—whether that’s taking photographs, making books, or producing videos—gives me so much energy that I want to keep doing it for the rest of my life.

The magical moment of turning nothing into something continues to fascinate me. That act of creation keeps me engaged and curious, and I expect it will stay with me until the very end.

3. Who are your biggest influences, and who are your favorite photographers at the moment?

When I first started photographing, my biggest influences were Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Bill Brandt, and Paolo Roversi, and they still influence me to a certain extent today. They are photographers who changed the course of photography and fashion imagery and were successful in presenting their work as art. I still enjoy looking at their dynamic sense of composition and analog aesthetic.

In recent years, I have found myself looking more and more to other forms of art for inspiration, especially painting and architecture. I express my creativity through photography, but that doesn’t mean I need to be inspired only by photographers. I often prefer to draw inspiration from different art forms and translate those ideas back into photography.

4. At what point in your creative journey did you realize that you had “made it”?

I don’t think you ever truly feel like you’ve “made it,” and that’s probably a good thing. There’s always a sense that you’re still on your way, still learning, experimenting, and trying new things.

If the question is about recognition, a turning point for me was getting my first gallery show. That moment brings acknowledgment from different sources: magazines, curators, and institutions that want to exhibit your work. It shows that your work is strong enough to exist at that level.

However, I have never felt that I have arrived or made it. The moment you feel that way suggests an ending. For me, there is no endpoint. You keep evolving and improving. In that sense, I don’t feel like I’ve made it, and I don’t expect that I ever will.

5. Do models have creative input when collaborating, or do they follow certain cues?

I enjoy working with models who contribute creatively and approach the shoot as a collaboration. It is important to me that we arrive at something together. I am not the type of photographer who simply dictates what needs to be done and insists that there is only one way to do it.

I am always open to suggestions and different perspectives. While I usually know what I’m looking for, I like to leave room for coincidence and the contributions of those around me. This includes the entire team: makeup, styling, and the model.

I especially appreciate it when a model shares her own ideas because those moments often lead to results I could not have imagined beforehand.

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The exhibition marks the world premiere of the project and coincides with the release of the book HENRO, published on the same date.

HENRO is the result of a two year process, beginning with a pilgrimage across Japan and ending with a completely new body of work, presentation, and publication. A project shaped by movement and time.

More details on the exhibition, editions, and availability will follow soon. Scrol down for a sneak preview of some works.

Behind HENRO

HENRO began as a journey, not a project.

My brother and I followed the Shikoku Henro pilgrimage route in Japan, which connects eighty-eight temples across the island of Shikoku. We completed the entire journey by bicycle. That choice defined everything. Cycling created a rhythm that sat between speed and stillness. It was fast enough to cover distance but slow enough to remain exposed to the weather, terrain, fatigue, and chance encounters.

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This month alone, I finished six books. They covered different subjects, featured different voices, and took me to different worlds. But only a few have really stayed with me.

The two books below made the deepest impression. In very different ways, they both deal with perception, awareness, and how we relate to the world around us. One deals with the fear of losing sight, and the other deals with the practice of going inward to see more clearly.

This month’s other inspirations seem to naturally orbit around that same theme. How we look. How we observe. How we create meaning through form, rhythm, space, sound, and image.

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Book: De blinde fotograaf by Hannes Wallrafen

De Blinde Fotograaf tells the story of a photographer who gradually loses his sight and must relearn how to live, move, and relate to the world without vision. The book is both a personal account and a practical reflection on what it truly means to be blind in a society built around sight.

I was drawn to this book for a very simple reason. Losing my sight is my greatest fear. Photography is how I navigate the world.

It’s how I see, think, and understand. The idea of losing that ability is terrifying. Perhaps that fear is exactly why I felt compelled to read this book.

De Blinde Fotograaf is a Dutch book, and unfortunately, there is no English translation available. It’s a shame because the insights it offers feel universal.

The book is not just about losing your sight. It is about what comes after. About learning how to move through a world that is no longer built for the way you perceive it. Wallrafen writes with clarity, humor, and an honesty that never turns dramatic.

It offers real insight into what blindness means. The logistics. The constant adjustments. The mental discipline it requires. It is confronting, yes, but also grounding. Reading it made me more aware of how blind people move through daily life, and how much we take visual autonomy for granted.

This quote stayed with me:

“I even burst out laughing once when I had crossed a street under construction and accidentally ended up in a pit as deep as a man is tall. Anyone who, as a blind person, constantly worries about all the terrible things that might happen, would be better off staying behind the geraniums.”

Fear is present, but so is resilience.

Book: Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch

It’s one of those books I return to again and again. Not because it provides answers, but because it prompts thought-provoking questions. It’s about creativity. About ideas. About consciousness. It emphasizes the importance of protecting the space where ideas can surface.

Lynch discusses meditation not as a lifestyle accessory but as a practical tool. It’s a way to access deeper layers of thought. It’s a way to generate better ideas.

Some lines continue to resonate:

“Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don’t let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate.”

“The more the artist is suffering, the less creative he is going to be.”

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.”

And the one that stays closest to how I think about making work:

“A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words. The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time they see the film, these things enter into the experience. And then the film becomes different. I think it’s so precious and important to maintain that world and not say certain things that could break the experience. You don’t need anything outside of the work.”

Architecture: Zicatela House by Ludwig Godefroy and Emmanuel Picault

Lately, I’ve become increasingly drawn to Mexican architecture. Zicatela House feels both ancient and contemporary. Its design is inspired by Aztec temples and expressed through monolithic concrete forms. The forms are heavy and grounded. Steps, pools, and bridges. It’s architecture that feels carved rather than constructed. What makes it work for me is the balance. The brutality of concrete is softened by dark wood. The warmth introduced through interior design choices. It never becomes cold.

It’s brutalism with soul.

Art : Antonio González

(Valencia, Spain, 1974) is an abstract painter and a colleague at the Alzueta Gallery.

I love his work for its restraint. His pieces consist of dots, repetition, and minimal gestures that somehow carry weight. His work is quiet, yet never empty. There is confidence in knowing when to stop. That discipline shows.

Music: St. Germain — “Rose Rouge”

This track was on repeat while I walked through Barcelona at the end of January. The sun was on my face, and I had no rush. I was just moving.

An old one. But it’s still incredibly strong. It carries a mood that doesn’t age.

Photography: Dovima with Elephants by Richard Avedon

Some images stay with you forever. This is one of them.

Taken in 1955 at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, “Dovima with Elephants” was originally published in a Paris fashion story for Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon once described fashion photography as “a vacation from life,” and this image embodies that sentiment.

He first saw the elephants standing beneath a vast skylight. Then came the dress: It was the first design for Dior by nineteen-year-old Yves Saint Laurent. Everything aligned to create something surreal.

Dovima stands poised and fearless. Her elegant form mirrored the elephants’ curves. There is tension, grace, and control. It’s a carefully improvised dream image.

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See you next month for more inspiration

— Bastiaan