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We shot on Thursday, 28 May 2026, at Studio Le Petit Oiseau Va Sortir in Paris. Rebecca is the fashion director at Numéro and has collaborated with me on every story I have created for the magazine, from Numéro 252 in November 2024 to this issue. She put the wardrobe together: pleated dresses and shawls by Issey Miyake, a leather cape by Givenchy, a draped silk dress with a hood by Balenciaga, a fringed dress by Comme des Garçons and a headpiece by Zeil Millinery. Olivier de Vriendt did the hair and Maria Olsson did the make-up; both were also part of the January team.

In September, Tippi Renaudat, assistant art director at Numéro, made the selection together with Babeth Djian, and I agreed with their edit. From there, the work was about letting the images live next to each other. A colour image and a black-and-white image on facing pages should feel as if they come from the same eye, and achieving that balance took time and attention. I am still learning about colour, and every colour series I create is an experiment. After this one, though, I have a feeling that colour, used in this way, suits me.

I still think in black and white, and most of my work will stay that way. Numéro gives me the space to experiment with colour within commissioned work at this level, with a team around me that makes it possible. I could not have created this series without them, and I am eager to see where colour will take me next.

The full story, sixteen images, is in the November issue of Numéro. If you come across a copy, I would love to hear which images stayed with you.

Thank you for reading.

— Bastiaan

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This month has been all about one exhibition, ten years of returning to the same person in the same studio, as I wrote about in Ten Years with Tino . Perhaps that is why everything that has stayed with me this month has one thing in common. A hat maker who has been working for ninety years. A sculptor who keeps coming back to three shapes. A photographer who has been reprinting the same image for years. And music built on repetition. It is all about staying with one thing long enough for it to become yours.

Here is what stayed with me.

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Librairie 7L and Couvre-chef

At the end of September, I was in Paris for the launch of Couvre-chef, the book that Maison Michel published to celebrate its ninetieth anniversary. The launch took place at Librairie 7L, the bookshop that Karl Lagerfeld founded in 1999 at 7 Rue de Lille. If you love books, it is definitely worth going out of your way to visit.

The book revolves around a single word: couvre-chef, meaning ‘headwear’. Spanning 304 pages, it explores the history of hats, their forms and functions, with contributions from Boris Bergmann and Julien Magalhães, as well as an interview with Priscilla Royer, the artistic director of Maison Michel. It also features a photographic series that I created with Tino and Malijn Pieterse. I am very honoured that this work is part of a book about ninety years of craft. The images from that shoot are also on display at La Galerie du 19M in Paris until 13 December, as I mentioned in my invitation of 8 October (Your invitation: Tino 10 Years).

Couvre-chef is published by Éditions 7L in French .

David Nash: Sphere, Cube, Pyramid

David Nash is a sculptor who works primarily with wood. He does not use chisels or sandpaper. He uses a chainsaw and a blowtorch. For decades, he has repeatedly returned to the same three forms: the sphere, the cube, and the pyramid.

What I find so compelling is the way he gives each shape its own direction. The cube is cut vertically, the sphere horizontally and the pyramid diagonally. The marks of the chainsaw remain visible, revealing how each form was created. Then he chars the wood until the surface turns black and rich. These three basic shapes are made by hand from a material that was once a living tree.

One of his exhibitions had a title that says it all: Pyramids Rise, Spheres Turn, Cubes Stand Still. Each shape has its own movement, even when it does not move at all.

Earlier this year, I wrote about two other artists who allow time to work on their materials: Hannsjörg Voth and his spiral of loam in What’s Underneath , and Jon Foreman and his stones on the beach in The Things We Share. Nash belongs in that category for me.

Nadav Kander: The Edge of Things

In September, I attended the opening of The Edge of Things, a large solo exhibition by Nadav Kander curated by David Campany, at Foam in Amsterdam. The exhibition runs until 20 January 2027. I recommended his book The Meeting in a Monthly Inspiration post last year , and seeing his work displayed only increased my admiration.

Kander is an unusual photographer, in the best possible way. He has photographed Barack Obama, David Lynch and Rosamund Pike for some of the world’s biggest magazines. He has also spent years photographing the low, grey marshes and mudflats of the Thames Estuary, where the river leaves London to meet the North Sea. He moves between these two worlds as if there were no border between them. What connects them is his fascination with human fragility and the passing of time. At Foam, this comes together in photographs and video accompanied by music by Max Richter, as well as a projection featuring Kander’s own narration.

What I admire most is how slowly he works. For Dark Line, he spent hours at the estuary until dusk, taking long exposures. He reprinted the images several times over a period of years until they felt, in his words, like water. Two weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of letting images rest before judging them in Certainty is a poor editor. Kander takes this idea further than anyone I know.

At the opening, I bought two signed books: Dark Line, which is about the Thames Estuary, and The Edge of Things. Both are highly recommended.

Marcal: Ultimamente

I have been listening to a lot of techno again lately. One track I keep coming back to is Ultimamente by Marcal, a Brazilian techno producer. Ultimamente means ‘lately’, which feels fitting. In September, I shared another track that has stayed with me: Counting Comets by Marc Romboy, which I featured in The Things We Share

Music has always been part of my work. I am preparing to set up a bigger project at the end of the year that has everything to do with music and techno. I will tell you more about it soon.

That was my month. Four very different things, all of which are about patience: a hat maker, a sculptor and a photographer who each stay with one thing until it becomes theirs, and a track built on repetition.

What has stayed with you this month? Hit reply, I read every message myself.

If you are near Alkmaar tomorrow: Tino 10 Years opens on Friday 30 October from 16:00 to 19:00 at Studio Woudt, Hazenkoog 9. Registration is required . You can also buy the catalogue from today in the 1605 Collective webshop .

More soon.

— Bastiaan

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Seven years have passed since then, and I find myself thinking about it more often. This is partly because people still order the book. But mostly because the idea behind it has never left me.

What the project was

Usually, people come to my studio to be photographed. For Amsterdam Portraits, however, the studio went to them. A trailer was converted into a fully-equipped photo studio measuring two metres wide, 2.15 metres high and 4.25 metres long. A company that usually transports art for museums and galleries moved it around the city.

We worked for ten days, spread between April and August 2019, in a different location each day. These included the Lindengracht and the Noordermarkt. The Museumplein and the summer evening party at the Rijksmuseum. We also worked in the districts of Zuid, Zuidas, Oost, Noord and Zuidoost in the Bijlmer. I can no longer name every exact spot, but each location had its own unique charm. The Bijlmer was one of my favourites because of the enormous variety of people walking past.

We never needed a permit. The police would stop by every now and then to see what we were doing. Once they found out, they thought it was a great idea.

How it worked

In the morning, we would park the trailer, open the studio, and start approaching people on the street. We asked if they wanted to take part and showed them our work. Many people agreed straight away. Many others did not want to participate, and that was fine. Some walked on but came back later.

Most of the people we met were on their way somewhere, usually to work or an appointment. Some told me they had two or five minutes. Others stayed for half an hour. After a while, word spread through the neighbourhood, and people started coming to us for photographs. There was a lot of positivity around the trailer.

In the end, I think I photographed more than two hundred people. Het Parool published one of the portraits across a full page every week, along with the person’s name and profession. That same year, the project was made into a book: it was 192 pages long, measured 25 by 34 centimetres, was printed in duotone, and was published in an edition of 1,000. It also featured an essay by Erik Vroons.

The next city

Amsterdam Portraits was always intended as a starting point. From the outset, the plan was to take the project to other major cities: LA Portraits and New York Portraits. Seven years later, I still believe I should do it. London, Los Angeles, New York and Paris.

To do this properly, I need the right collaborations. If you work for a brand, company, institution or museum and can see a place for this project in your city, please reply directly to this email. I would love to talk about where Amsterdam Portraits could go next.

This is how the project was presented. In the rest of this deep dive, I will explore what happened inside the trailer in more detail: why people who walked in off the street were less nervous than those who came to my studio; the man from the Noordermarkt who stayed with me more than anyone else; the connection to a portrait studio on the Leidseplein from 1913; and my belief that pictures like these are important for a city.

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The images I am most sure about are sometimes the best ones. My eye has been trained by years of creating work, and most of the time I trust it completely. However, certainty is a feeling and a feeling can point in more than one direction. Over the years, I have learned to treat certainty as a starting point for a decision, rather than the decision itself.

Certainty begins much earlier than the editing process. It is at work during the shoot, long before I sit down with the images. Each time I take four or five frames from the same position, shifting a shoulder or chin by a centimetre, I am making a choice. Every time I decide that a shape is finished or that we should try one more thing, I am making a choice. By the end of the day’s shoot, much of the selection has already been made without a single image having been viewed on a screen.

This is why I want to understand what certainty actually is. When I am sure about an image, it feels like a judgement of its quality. More often than not, it is a measure of recognition. The image matches something I already know: my own way of seeing things, an image that has worked before or a shape that feels like mine. Recognition and quality produce the same feeling, and you cannot tell them apart from the inside. When my eye recognises something new, certainty is the best guide I have. When it only recognises something familiar, the same feeling leads me to images I have already created.

In the rest of this piece, I will show you how I work on set, explain why I leave shoots for weeks before looking at them for the first time, discuss the work I did not want to include that sold out and reveal the images I chose with full conviction that nobody else seemed to see. This applies to photographs, but I suspect it also applies to anything you create and then have to select from.

Before the editing process begins

Tino and I build it up until we have gone too far, and then we take it apart piece by piece until we find a solution that works. Sometimes, the solution turns out to be the first thing we tried an hour earlier. One of my favourite pictures that we have ever created came about exactly like that.

Had I followed my certainty in that first hour, I would have stopped there and never realised that the image was right. Had I followed my certainty three hours later, I would have kept the overbuilt version. The picture exists because I persevered beyond the point where I felt sure, and then came back.

There is another image from one of those days. A shape was resting on her head; it fell and I photographed her at the moment it came off. That photo only exists because we had been working for long enough for something to go wrong. Having certainty on set is useful because it keeps you moving. However, it becomes a limit the moment it stops you from capturing the image you did not plan.

Letting a shoot rest

After a shoot, I often leave the images untouched for one or two weeks, sometimes even three, before I look at them for the first time. Right now, I am in exactly that phase. I did a shoot two weeks ago, but I have not opened the files yet. The first edit will probably happen next week. The real selection and finishing of the images will follow a few weeks after that.

I work this way because the images continue to develop in my mind when I am not looking at them. Some of them stick with me and grow. Others fade before I have seen them again. By the time I sit down for the first edit, I am looking at them with different eyes to those I had on the day itself.

And the process repeats. A shoot is edited in rounds, sometimes over months. An image that I was completely sure about in the first round sometimes does not survive the third. It drops out, changes or turns out to need the image next to it more than I thought. Each round provides the necessary time for certainty to be tested. What remains after three rounds has earned its place.

The work that I did not choose

In 2021, I prepared an exhibition with Bildhalle in Amsterdam. One piece that I had excluded from my selection was Hortense. I could not see how it connected to the rest of the works. However, Mirjam, who runs the gallery, was convinced of its quality and wanted to include it. We hung it.

Hortense sold out.

This story illustrates how a successful exhibition comes together. Mirjam viewed the work from a different perspective, using her own judgement and knowledge of her collectors. She saw something in the image that my own perception of the series had overlooked. Trusting your eye does not mean rejecting anyone else’s.

The selection for Henro was the hardest I have ever made. I cycled more than twelve hundred kilometres and visited eighty-eight temples, but in the end I left out far more than I included. In the last days before the exhibition, I added a few images back into the selection that I had previously set aside. One of them was Sakura. Those images completed the exhibition. They were the ones that made the sequence feel complete.

The image only I can see

It works the other way, too. There are images that I have chosen with full conviction for an exhibition or a proposal to a gallery that never sold. This happens more often than people might think. Sometimes I wonder why others do not see what I see in them.

I think part of the answer lies in a blind spot. I know my own work so well that I can recognise my signature style in an image immediately, and that recognition feels like strength. To me, this image is clearly one of mine. However, a signature can also become overused. What feels essential to me may feel familiar to someone who has seen my work before. The image carries something real and something I have shown before. From where I stand, I can only see the first part.

This is where the initial explanation comes in. Certainty told me that the image was right. In fact, it was telling me that I recognised it.

What I take from it

I trust my eye. I would not be able to create work without that ability. What I have learned is how to structure that trust: to keep shooting past the moment I feel sure, to let the images rest before judging them, to edit in stages and see what remains, and to listen when someone whose eye I respect sees something I do not.

Certainty is a good starting point, but a poor editor. The images that survive all that are the ones I can stand completely behind.

More soon.

— Bastiaan

Friday 30 October 2026, 16:00 to 19:00

Studio Woudt, Hazenkoog 9, Alkmaar

Registration is required and places are limited to 200. Please register here so we know you are coming: studiowoudt.com/events/opening-tino-10-year-show

Everyone who attends the opening will receive a copy of the exhibition catalogue to take home. Tino will be there too.

In September, I wrote the full story of our ten-year collaboration. Below is a shorter version with all the information you need about the exhibition and the evening.

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The exhibition

The exhibition brings together fifteen works from 2016 to 2026 in three sizes. It is the first time these images have been shown together. Almost every picture that Tino and I have created together was made in my studio in Alkmaar, so the work returns to where it all began. Fourteen works hang on the walls. Tino Crown, the oldest piece from 2016, is displayed on a stand because it is the work that started it all.

Arranging the pictures in order revealed something I had never planned. The earliest images focus on skin, hair and texture. Then form takes over until the body almost disappears. The most recent piece returns to fabric and gesture, with a body present in the frame. Ten years of photographing the same person has changed my work, and I could only see that once the fifteen pictures were displayed together. This exhibition showcases that transformation.

The catalogue

This catalogue was created especially for this exhibition, and each guest at the opening receives a copy. It has 48 pages, measures 16.5 by 22.5 centimetres, and is a softback printed in an edition of 500.

From Thursday 29 October, the catalogue will also be available to purchase from the 1605 Collective webshop (https://1605collective.com/) for €20. Only 150 copies will be made available online. The rest are reserved for visitors to the exhibition.

Modiste

One piece that I particularly want to show you is Modiste, the newest piece in the exhibition. Tino and I created it in March this year when we collaborated on a shoot for Maison Michel, the Parisian hat maker that has been part of the Chanel group since 1997. It features a wide black straw hat, her profile beneath it and a body wrapped in a dark cone. The title is the French word for a woman who makes hats.

Headwear as sculpture has been part of our work since we made our first crown in 2016. Visiting the workshop of a company that has been making hats since 1936 felt like arriving somewhere.

Meanwhile in Paris

The images from that shoot are on display in Paris right now. Métamorphoses, les chapeaux de Maison Michel at la Galerie du 19M celebrates ninety years of Maison Michel, and my photographs of Tino are part of the exhibition. If you are in Paris before 13 December, it is well worth a visit. Entry is free.

La Galerie du 19M, 2 Place Skanderbeg, 75019 Paris. Until 13 December 2026, open Wednesday to Sunday, 11:00 to 18:30. You can find more information on the le19M website (https://www.le19m.com/en/agenda/metamorphoses-hats-by-maison-michel).

Register for the opening

Friday 30 October 2026, 16:00 to 19:00

Studio Woudt, Hazenkoog 9, Alkmaar

Registration is required. If you would like to attend, please register at studiowoudt.com/events/opening-tino-10-year-show. You are welcome to bring a guest; you can add them when you register.

If you cannot make it on the 30th, the exhibition runs until 31 March 2027 and can also be visited by appointment. Just reply to this email.

I hope to see you there.

More soon.

— Bastiaan

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I have written down our whole story, from the beginning until now, for anyone who wants to read more.

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It started with a post on Facebook. At that time, I had just one studio room and considerably more ideas than contacts. I put out an open call for a nude shoot, as you do when you have nothing else to work with. Among the replies was hers.

What I did not know at the time, and only found out years later when she announced it to the world, is that she had never done a nude shoot before. She had done topless shoots once or twice, but that was it. She replied anyway, letting me assume otherwise because she wanted the shoot badly enough to take the risk. By the time I found out, we had already taken the photos that would lead to us working together for a decade.

She also told me later why she had answered at all. That part of the story is the one I understand best now, but I understood it least at the time. She had spent years going to agencies in Amsterdam with her portfolio under her arm. Everywhere she went, they loved the pictures, but the answer was always the same. “Too short.” Not the right height for it. In her own account of those years, the word ‘height’ is repeated over and over again.

So, she stopped waiting to be picked and started choosing photographers herself. She was strict about it because she had seen other people starting out say yes to everyone, only to end up with a portfolio full of work they did not want. She only wrote to people whose work she genuinely admired. When she read my post, she noticed what was missing from it: any requirement at all. No height. No ethnicity. Nothing about a look.

She has since said that she applied to those with requirements too, because if you’re not slightly arrogant, you’ll only answer one post and have one shot. But mine was the one without any restrictions, and that is why it went to the top of the pile.

The first day did not go as either of us had expected, but neither of us mentioned it at the time. When she walked in, I told her that everything would be black and white, to which she nodded and got on with it. What was actually going through her mind, she only admitted to me much later, laughing, while we were recording. She was thinking that she didn’t want everything to be black and white; she wanted at least one or two things to be in colour. Then, in her words, ‘Have you seen my skin?’

Then she decided to let it go. She reminded herself that it wasn’t her shoot, that she had chosen to work with me for a reason and that the only thing to do was to trust the process and see what the outcome would be. This silent decision, made by someone who had known me for only an hour, is the reason why there will be an exhibition opening in October.

Another thing worth mentioning about that day is that we barely took any nude photos. The pictures that emerged from that initial session are not nude pictures. We built things and took them apart again. By the evening, I knew I wanted to continue working with her. As a way of working.

We have aimed to shoot once a year ever since. Sometimes it slips, and sometimes there are more. Between 2015 and 2020, we managed six shoots, which is about as close to a rhythm as we have ever come. There has never been a schedule or a contract; only a moment when one of us decides that it is time.

Almost all of our work has taken place in the same room. Apart from one afternoon on a beach years ago, every picture we have ever made together was made in the studio in Alkmaar. This exhibition therefore showcases ten years of work in one space. I did not realise this was unusual until I laid the selection out and counted.

The days are long, from nine in the morning until roughly seven in the evening, and there is always a team. Janneke Schrey is building the shapes with me now. In the early years, it was Nathalie Alting-Sieberg, alongside a rotating group of make-up artists. Some years, there was also somebody filming in the background.

There is always music, a mix of our tastes: I lean towards dance and techno, while Tino puts on hip-hop, rap and R&B. The person in front of the camera has to feel at home before anything good happens, and music is the fastest way to achieve that. So the playlist brings together two worlds, and that is exactly right.

There is also a great deal of talking, most of which is hers. Tino is loudly and generously present, bringing an enormous amount of energy into the room, so there is energy there all day. People imagine my sets are silent because the pictures are quiet, but they’re not silent at all. They are loud, and the quiet arrives afterwards.

We prepare by looking at materials beforehand and thinking about which things might sit together and what shapes they could make, but that’s just the starting point — the images themselves are invented on the day. We almost never work with clothing. The shapes are built out of whatever we have gathered. Because the work is black and white, everything has to earn its place through its texture rather than what it actually is.

Then we start building and keep going until we have gone too far. We take it all apart piece by piece until we find what works, and sometimes what works turns out to be the first thing we tried an hour earlier. One of my favourite pictures that we have ever made came about in exactly that way.

There is another one where a shape was resting on her head and it fell, and I photographed her at the moment it came off. That image only exists because we had been working long enough that day for something to go wrong. You cannot repeat it and you cannot stage it, and if you tried it again it would be dead on arrival. A day with Tino also produces more usable images than any other shoot I do in a year, consistently, and I have never entirely understood why.

For a shoot to work as a collaboration, both people have to be genuinely invested. The moment I am on set doing nothing but pushing my own ideas, the other person becomes a prop, and you can see that in the pictures. Tino once described what the other version looks like from her side of the camera. With most photographers, if she wants to try something that hasn’t occurred to them, she has to wait for them to adjust a light, quickly execute her idea while they’re not looking, and then wait for them to notice it and take credit for it. She says that in her head, she thinks this is what she suggested twenty minutes ago.

She also works differently with me than with anyone else, and she noticed that long before I did. With me, she is more static with smaller movements and holds poses for longer because she knows that I will take four or five frames of the same position with a shoulder or chin shifted by a centimetre. Elsewhere, she moves far more because that’s what the work in front of her requires. She adapts her entire approach to whoever she is working with, and nobody asked her to.

She once told me that I am the only photographer to ever ask her to wear her hair naturally, and I have thought about that a great deal since. It had never occurred to me to ask for anything else.

The oldest picture in this exhibition is Tino Crown, taken in 2016. It shows her back with her hair built up into a shape. It is the only piece in the exhibition where her hair is the main focus rather than something you glimpse under a brim. This picture also taught me what this collaboration was going to be about because, although you never see her face, it is unmistakably her.

When I asked Tino for a quote for this piece, she sent back a message that was far too generous to print in full. One line I cannot leave out is: ‘You made me realise I have a beautiful back.’

She came here from Zimbabwe when she was twelve. Her mother was a model, so she had been working in front of a camera since she was a child, long before either of us knew each other, and she has therefore been involved in this industry for considerably longer than I have.

In 2020, everything stopped. The shoots stopped, as did the exhibitions, and it was during that long, empty period that I started 1605 Publishers, which has since grown into 1605 Collective. I decided that the first book had to matter, and by then Tino and I had been working together for five years — a significant anniversary in itself. The first book we ever published was Tino.

It was all black with one word on the cover. It was an edition of 150, each of which included a print that she had chosen herself. It sold out in five days.

I did not tell her it existed. I gave it to her on the day we sat down to record a long conversation. The microphones were already running, so there is an audio recording of her opening it for the first time. She cried. On tape, she says to nobody in particular that I made her a book and that she cried like a baby. I still cannot listen to that part without stopping what I am doing.

The print inside wasn’t a one-off gesture either. From the very beginning, we have had an arrangement whereby, after every shoot, she chooses an image, which I then have printed and framed for her. Ten years’ worth of these hang on a wall somewhere other than this gallery.

Selecting just fifteen pictures from ten years of work is a strange exercise, but I would recommend it to anyone who has been doing the same thing for a long time. Laying the pictures out in order reveals things about your work that you never intended, and once they are side by side, there’s no arguing with them.

In the earliest pictures, there is skin, hair and grain, but not much else. Then form starts to dominate, so that by Cycle II in 2020, her face is a silhouette caught between two white discs. By Fold in 2022, the body has almost disappeared beneath a pleated fan. Nobody planned any of this, and at some point it changed again because the most recent work returns to fabric, gesture, and a body that is present in the frame. Ten years of returning to the same subject matter produces a shift in style, and I could not see this shift until I put the pictures in order.

The most recent picture was taken in March this year when Tino and I were working together on a shoot for Maison Michel, the Parisian hat maker that has been part of the Chanel group since 1997. That day resulted in Modiste: a wide black straw hat, her profile beneath it and the body wrapped in a dark cone. The title is the French word for a woman who makes hats.

The idea of headwear as sculpture has been present in our work since the creation of the first crown in 2016, so visiting the workshop of a company that has been producing these items since 1936 felt like arriving somewhere.

The exhibition will comprise fifteen works from 2016 to 2026, in three sizes. Fourteen of the works will be displayed on the walls, while Tino Crown will be displayed on a stand. This felt like the right way to present the picture that started it all. You will walk in and have ten years within arm’s reach, which is exactly what I wanted for this show. One more line from that same message: ‘It’s been an absolute honour to have you capture me these past 10 years, and I cannot wait to see what the next 10 years will bring.’ Tino will be there on the thirtieth, and after all this time, it seems only fair that we should stand in that room together, surrounded by all the works.

Opening: Friday 30 October 2026, 16:00–19:00

Studio Woudt, Hazenkoog 9, Alkmaar

Registration required: studiowoudt.com/events/opening-tino-10-year-show

The exhibition runs until 31 March 2027 and can also be visited by appointment.

More information to follow.

— Bastiaan

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Reflecting on the summer, I realised that almost everything that has stayed with me was introduced to me by someone else. A friend, an author, an artist who left work on a beach for strangers to find, and a scientist who spent two hours thinking out loud. This edition is me passing those things on.

Marc Romboy – Counting Comets

The track is ‘Counting Comets’ by Marc Romboy, released on Bedrock in 2016. I have played it many times since that evening, and it has done what a real discovery does: reminded me of the beauty of music. Few things feed my curiosity like new music. I wrote about this before in The Shape of Curiosity. What the weekend added was the other half of it. A discovery grows when you share it and talk about it, and a track means more when you know who introduced you to it.

Jon Foreman: Sculpt the World

Jon Foreman is a land artist from Pembrokeshire, Wales. He arranges stones on beaches, sorted by size and colour, into circles, lines, and gradients. Then the tide comes in and takes the work back. He photographs the work, and the photograph is all that remains. In the May edition, I wrote about Hannsjörg Voth, who built a spiral of loam knowing it would erode. Like Voth, Foreman embraces the idea of impermanence, leaving his creations on public beaches where passers-by may discover them during their brief existence. It is this generosity that stays with me: creating something and giving it to the tide.

Carlien Cavens, ‘De trip van je leven’

De Trip van je Leven (The Trip of Your Life) by Carlien Cavens is a Dutch-language book about psychedelics, written for people who have never set foot in that world. I have been familiar with it for years, and I still read this book with great pleasure. It clearly and calmly explains what these substances do, what the research says and how to approach them responsibly, taking the health side seriously. If you are curious but don’t know where to begin, this is the book I would recommend. For now, it only exists in Dutch. I have written about this subject myself in Translating an Altered State, and I discussed the science with Zeus Tipado on the Studio Notes podcast.

David Sinclair on Modern Wisdom

The longest thing I listened to this summer was Chris Williamson’s conversation with David Sinclair, the Harvard geneticist behind the information theory of ageing. In a nutshell, his idea is that ageing is the loss of information, the pattern that tells your cells who they are, and that this pattern can be repaired. His lab has reversed blindness in old mice, and the first human trials are underway. He even says out loud that the first person to reach 150 may already be alive. I found it a fascinating two hours. I also noticed the connection with the essay I sent last week about a coin that reminds me that it could all end today. I think the two belong together. Whether the horizon is tomorrow or a century away, the conclusion is the same: the hours are what matter.

Four things, four people who passed them on. The friend with the track, the artist on the beach, the writer opening a door and the scientist thinking ahead. Keep passing things on to each other. That’s how everything in this edition reached me.

What has stayed with you this summer? Hit reply — I read every message myself.

— Bastiaan

For almost a year now, I have had a coin in my pocket. It is a memento mori medallion from the Daily Stoic shop. It is small and has three symbols pressed into the front: a skull, a flower and an hourglass. Death, life, time. On the back, inside a laurel wreath, is one line from Marcus Aurelius: ‘You could leave life right now.’ In Meditations, the sentence continues: ‘Let that determine what you do, say and think.’ The coin and my phone share a pocket, so several times a day, I reach for one and touch the other. Often, while I am looking and thinking, I end up holding the coin in my hand.

The symbols are centuries older than the coin itself. In the seventeenth century, Philippe de Champaigne painted Still Life with a Skull: a tulip, a skull, and an hourglass on a ledge. Painters called this a ‘vanitas’, and I keep coming back to how complete the image is. Three objects, and the whole subject is there: life, death, and time passing while you look.

The Stoics, Roman thinkers who meant their philosophy for daily use, came up with the habit of holding those three things together. Seneca advised an emperor, Marcus Aurelius was one: and Epictetus had been a slave. One of their practices was memento mori: remember that you will die. It is Seneca’s words that stay with me. He wrote that dying happens every minute and that time passing belongs to death already. By the end of your life, you will have died every year of your life.

Earlier this year, I watched a video by , the author of The Daily Stoic, in which he discussed this exact idea. One passage has stayed with me since then. ‘We protect our property and safeguard our money,’ he says, ‘and yet we are careless with the one thing that never comes back.’ Time is the only resource a creator cannot replenish.

So I have started to read the title of this piece as a genuine question: How do you handle your time once you accept that it is finite? In the rest of this piece, I will explain how this year with the coin has affected my daily routine, how I have allocated my time, what I have said no to this year, and what I want to leave behind when I am gone. This is the part I usually keep to myself.

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For years, I said no to workshops. People asked, and I declined every time because I did not feel like the right person to tell anyone what to do. I am not a teacher. In my view, a workshop in a studio ends up being all about where you place your lights and how you direct a model, and that never felt right to me.

Then Kaat Celis of De Donkere Kamer started asking, and she kept asking for years. What changed my mind in the end was the nature of her proposal. It was a full week on the road with a small group of photographers in an almost otherworldly place. I will photograph alongside you and, along the way, I will demonstrate how I approach a project: the planning, observation and decision-making processes.

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This is more than just a workshop. The week requires independence and your own plan. Nobody will be taken by the hand. You work, I work, and at the end of every day, we sit down together to review our work and talk about photography in that setting.

The location is Estancia El Condor on the shores of Lago San Martín in Argentine Patagonia, at the foot of the Andes. It covers 40,000 hectares of untouched forest, lakes, mountains, rivers and open pampa. The nearest village is 360 kilometres away and the nearest airport is almost a five-hour drive away. There is no phone signal. The estancia generates its own power and runs its own kitchen, using vegetables and meat sourced from the land itself. There are condors here with a wingspan of four metres.

The journey is part of the experience. We spend the first night in El Calafate and then drive to the estancia ourselves in two 4x4s. Kaat drives one and I drive the other. She brings a Starlink for emergencies. Beyond that, we’ll be offline for the rest of the week.

The days are spent taking photographs of the gauchos and the landscape. Individual guidance is available whenever you want it, and there are group reviews in the evening. One day is spent on horseback, and Kaat gives a talk on the business side of a photography practice. I am particularly looking forward to the portrait work: a session with the whole group and some of the gauchos, the traditional Argentinian cowboys.

I hope that you will all learn something from the way I work. If even a small part of the evening reviews, feedback and my view of photography is useful and you carry it into your own work and style, and it improves your photography, then the week will have achieved its purpose.

The practical details:

Patagonia with Bastiaan Woudt

13–20 February 2027, seven nights, eight days

Estancia El Condor, Argentine Patagonia

Maximum eight photographers, five twin rooms with private bathrooms

€4,999 per person, excluding 21% VAT.

Included: accommodation, all meals and transfers. Flights and insurance are not included.

Applications are made via portfolio submission, and you will receive a response within a week. After acceptance, a 30% deposit confirms your place.

Apply now via donkerekamer.com/patagonia.

Kaat talks about the location in episode #282 of De Donkere Kamer,

and you can listen to our full Dutch conversation in episode #248.

If this opportunity sounds right for you, send us your portfolio. I look forward to seeing who the eight will be.

— Bastiaan

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I am in a position to compare the two sides of this. I handle my own sales in the Netherlands through Studio Woudt; for sales abroad, I work with galleries. I have been sending a newsletter since 2012. For years, I also poured work into platforms I did not control, as most of us do. So I have experienced both sides of the same question: who actually holds the connection between me and the people who care about my work?

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The door that closed

Three years ago, my personal Facebook account was permanently restricted from creating or managing advertising. Not the business pages, but the person behind them. Everything attached to that account lost the ability to advertise along with it: Studio Woudt, 1605 Collective and 1605 Studio. No message was sent to explain this. I only found out when something stopped working.

This spring, I finally got the case in front of a specialist team at Meta and offered them everything: I provided my passport, chamber of commerce registration, VAT number and full identity verification — whatever they wanted to see. The answer came back within days. The restriction was older than ninety days; restrictions older than ninety days could no longer be contested, and the chat was closed.

When I asked what I had actually done, I found out that it was a handful of rejected advertisements from between 2013 and 2016, made under a business name I no longer use. Boosted posts from nine to thirteen years ago.

There is no appeal process and no one to talk to. The window in which I could have defended myself had expired before I knew it existed.

That is what it means to build on rented ground.

What this is really about

Almost every artist I know is building an audience on a platform that does not belong to them. Most of us only realise what this means when it stops working. We are measuring the wrong thing. The number of followers is not the asset. The ability to reach those followers is the asset, and that ability belongs to someone else who can revoke it at any time without consulting you.

I have been doing this for a long time. The newsletter dates back to 2012 and only moved to Substack in 2024. That’s fourteen years of writing to a list rather than a feed. Last July, I ended my gallery representation in the Netherlands and started running the Dutch market myself. At the time, these felt like separate decisions. In fact, they were one and the same, and I now have enough data to determine their value.

In the rest of this piece, I will compare the value of a following of eighty-three thousand people to that of a list a fraction of that size, including the one figure about my own websites that changed how I run this business. I will explain the distinction it took me years to see between obstacles you can solve and those that have already been decided upon before you knew a decision was being made. I will also tell you exactly what I would do if I were starting again tomorrow, which is not the advice most people give.

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This will also mark the opening of their new space. MC2 is returning to Milan with a gallery on Via Maroncelli 7, in the Design District. Vincenzo Maccarone and Claudio Composti, who run the gallery together, have chosen to start the season with my work. I am grateful they did.

MC2gallery, Via Maroncelli 7, Milan.

Opening Thursday 10 September from 18:00.

On view until Sunday 27 September.

Wednesday to Sunday, 15:00–19:00, and by appointment.

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The exhibition features three elements: the portrait work I am known for; a group of pieces that have never been exhibited before; and a selection from Henro.

Mantle, Brim and Pearls are new. They have never been hung on a wall before, here or anywhere else. Alongside them are Solace, Revolve, Lune, Speckle,

And Portal. In July, I wrote that I had had Portal on my list for years and kept deciding that the time was not right, but I had finally released it as an edition. I also said that there was more to come. This is what I meant.

Henro leaves the Netherlands.

This is the first time that Henro will been shown outside the Netherlands.

The idea is to properly introduce the series here, and then let it travel. The same works will be exhibited at ArtVerona in October. I will be there as well.

Kage is in the selection and will be displayed in a large format.

Two of the Henro works were sold in June, before the exhibition had even been installed, to two collectors. That means a lot to me.

The book

Copies of Henro, published by 1605 Collective, are available at the gallery for anyone who would like to take the work home in that form.

I will be at the opening in Milan on 10 September. If you are in the city that evening, come and say hello! If you have any questions about the work or its availability, write to the gallery at info@mc2.gallery or reply to this email to contact me directly.

More soon.

— Bastiaan

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If you would like to attend, you are more than welcome. Attendance requires registration — click here

Hazenkoog 9, 1822 BS Alkmaar

Over the past year, I have received many messages from photographers, creative professionals, collectors and photography enthusiasts. Most of them were not asking about availability or prices. They wanted to see the work in person and understand how it is created.

The studio is normally a place of work. Visits happen by appointment, depending on what is on the table that week. So there has never really been an opportunity to respond to all of those messages at once.

This is that moment.

The day is not focused on buying. You are welcome to learn, look around, ask questions or simply be in the room.

Doors open at 12:00. Walk through the gallery and the working studio at your own pace. The book and archive sale are open all day, and I will be signing books in person.

15:00 — Mini masterclass: An hour with me and a guest speaker on my creative process. The guest speaker will be announced soon.

17:00 – Drinks to close the afternoon together.

18:00 — Close

THE ARCHIVE SALE

The archive sale features prints and work that are not usually for sale. These pieces will be available for one day only at accessible prices.

Once a piece is sold, it is gone.

THE FINISSAGE OF HENRO

The day also marks the end of the HENRO exhibition. This is your last chance to see the series on display in Alkmaar.

VIEW HENRO

Sunday, 20 September — Inspiration Day

12:00–18:00, with a mini masterclass at 15:00.

Hazenkoog 9, 1822 BS Alkmaar, Netherlands

Spaces are limited and registration is required.

CLAIM YOUR SPOT

One more thing before I close. In early September, I will be opening my solo exhibition with MC2 Gallery in Milan. I will provide the full details in two weeks.

I look forward to welcoming you.

— Bastiaan

Portal has been sitting on my list for a long time. Every few months I would return to it, look again, and decide it was not the moment. There was never anything wrong with the work. If anything, it was one of the strongest things I had made. I think I was holding it back until I was sure I understood it myself.

A black circle held inside a white form, the face appearing only at the edge. There is almost nothing in it, and that is the whole point. It asks you to slow down and look for the presence inside the reduction. The longer I lived with it, the more certain I became that it belonged as an edition.

This is one of my favorite releases of the year, and today felt like the moment to finally let it go.

There is more to come for Portal. It will be part of my solo exhibition with MC2 Gallery in Milan, opening in early September. I will share the full details when I am back. I wanted you to see the work here first.

Portal is available as an archival pigment print in two sizes, 45 × 60 cm and 90 × 120 cm. If you would like to know more about availability or pricing, reply to this email. I read every message myself.

One more thing.

The past months have been some of the busiest I can remember. I have decided to take the summer to step back properly. I am using the school holiday to travel, to be with the people closest to me, and to spend time away from the studio without a deadline waiting on the other side.

So this will be the only Studio Notes I send this month. I hope you understand. From August onward I will be back with the regular weekly rhythm, and with everything around Milan and a lot of other exciting news.

Thank you for being here, and for giving this work your attention.

More soon.

— Bastiaan

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Not vague hopes. Three complete lives, each built around one priority. The first was built around money. The second around freedom. The third around mastery. I gave each one a real shape. What I would earn, how my weeks would look, where I would live, what I would make, and what I would slowly stop doing.

It is a strange thing to do, and I think everyone should try it. Most of us carry these three versions around without ever looking at them straight. We tell ourselves we want all of it. More money, more freedom, deeper work. We assume they all point the same way. They do not.

The moment I saw the three lives next to each other, two things became clear, and both of them bothered me.

The first is that the life I dream about is not the life I would actually do well in. The version with the open calendar and the long stretches abroad looks beautiful on paper. When I picture living it for real, I can already feel myself getting restless by month six.

The second is harder to admit. One of these three pulls harder than the other two, and it is not the one I would choose out loud. It does not come in through the front door, where you can see it coming. It comes in through the side, dressed as ambition, and slowly takes over a life you thought you had already decided.

So here is what this is really about. Choosing a life is not about choosing. It is about what you are willing to give up, and whether you can live with losing the versions you did not pick. Almost nobody talks about that part. We talk about goals. We rarely talk about the lives we give up to reach them.

In the rest of this piece I will show you all three versions in full, the money life, the freedom life, and the mastery life, exactly as I wrote them. I will tell you which one I chose, and the uncomfortable thing I found out about the one I thought I wanted. And I will give you the one thing that decides which of your three lives you actually end up living, no matter which one you say you want.

This is the part I usually keep to myself. Here is what I found.

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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