The wonderful Mr. Walker Evans

"Stare. It's the way to educate your eyes. Pry, Listen, Eavesdrop.

Die knowing something. You are not here long".

-Walker Evans

The North

Leaving tomorrow for a place that i've been wanting to go to forever: the Lofoten islands in Norway. I'll be shooting an editorial there, i can't wait to see this place!

More images soon!

Nippon

Every once in a while you visit a place that is so exotic, so different from what you know that while you are there your perception changes. It's one of the things i love about being on the road, and it shakes up my photography which is always an enjoyable kind of scary. When you lose the ability to read or have a conversation and having no idea of the social codes things get interesting quickly..

This winter and the next i'm working on a book project on i'm-not-telling-you-yet. Think lots of love for the mountains expressed through snowboarding. For this project i went to Japan for two weeks, and what an amazing place it turned out to be. There are so many reasons why Japan is such a great place: humble, respectful, deeply conformist yet immensely creative people, a natural landscape that refuses to disappear under all the development, sushi three times a day. On top of that the Japanese have an aesthetic sensibility and an attention to detail that i am jealous of. And did i mention sushi?

Then there is the sad thing that the Japanese have somehow found a way to carry on with their daily lives while there is a smoldering nuclear reactor in their backyard. Which according to the government is not really that big of a problem. Yeah right. I hope they'll find a solution for that real soon.

Here are a few shots from that trip, can't wait 'till next winter..already bought the flight tickets!



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Scary.

Keep watching, there is some terrifying water and a very stoic guy halfway through..

Seasons

The blog has been a bit quiet, i've been working and having an amazing discovery-filled time in Japan the past few weeks. More on that later!

While i was there it was the middle of winter: cold, enormous amounts of snow, deer&snow rabbits and a quiet that only happens in winter. I wish that season would never end..but it always does, and upon returning summer had started in my home town. The beach is buzzing again, the birds are singing and the days are growing longer and longer. So let's get into that summer feeling as fast as possible: check out the work of Robert Bechtle. His work takes me to hot, sundrenched days instantly. It's dreamy and slow yet realistic. To me there is no artist who can render sunlight like he does, you can almost feel the sunlight on your skin when looking at his work!

Besides this i think there is another great thing about this underrated artist. One of the things i love about photography is how it can lift seemingly ordinary scenes out of their everyday surroundings and doing so, expose them as extraordinary. Robert Bechtle does this like no other. He starts with a photograph of everyday, seemingly mundane scenes and by turning them into one of his photorealistic paintings he treats them with an enormous amount of attention to detail. These street scenes and holiday snaps turn into extraordinary places and moments, something i think is fantastic because it proves that these cinematic, beautiful scenes can be found anywhere by anybody. The world is a very, very pretty place if only you enjoy wide-eyed wandering.

If you like this work check out the book 'retrospective', it shows a good selection of his paintings. And let's hope his work finally comes over to a European museum soon!

More images can be seen if you click 'read more'...




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Style

Olympia

Say you live in a society that is governed by strict rules. Decency is highly valued and social rules are there to be followed. There is a distinct upper class and if you want to join that club, you better act the part.

Say these rules are adhered to in every part of public life, even art. There is a commission of wise men who decide what good art should look like, right down to the individual parts that make up an artwork and how they should be visualized. Sound Orwellian to you? Well, in 1863 this was pretty much reality: paintings should show certain subjects painted in a certain way. The closer you followed the rules, the more chance you had to have your painting chosen by a comittee as a winner for the main Parisian artshow called the salon, pretty much guaranteeing succes as an artist.

Enter Mr. Édouard Manet, who created a painting for this exhibition which in my opinion is simultanuously the invention of modern art and a big fat fucking middle finger in the face of conformity.

He confronted what everybody already knew, but nobody talked about: at the dandiest of gatherings he presented a painting of what was instantly recognizable as a hooker. Instantly recognizable because the city's brothels were thriving on visits by the same people who visited the salon. A hooker and a proud one at that, staring the viewer right in the face, as if showing that she knew all too well she was the one thing everybody knew about, but pretended did not exist. Manet chose to tell the truth and in doing so risked his livelihood and his reputation.
The painting was met with jeers, criticism, and disdain. It was attacked by the public, the critics, the newspapers. Guards had to be stationed next to it to protect it, until finally it was moved to a spot high above a doorway, out of reach of the insulted public

By doing this Manet did something that changed art: he confronted conformity, questioned morality and most of all turned art into an opinion instead of just aesthetics.

Check out this painting if you are at the Museé d'Orsay, i think it's everything art should be: proud, ballsy and a slap in the face!

The American Folk Blues Festival

Maybe your honey just left you for that one-eyed milkman. Maybe like me you get daily emails from friends that tell you there is an Orangutan now that also makes photographs and he has ten thousand facebookbuddies.

Or perhaps you are into the blues just because it makes you feel good. If so check this out: starting in the early sixties, two promoters came up with the idea of introducing original African-American blues performers to a European public. What followed was a series of concerts that in my opinion were amazing. Artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson toured Europe in "The American Folk Blues Festival".

Yes, the the little scenarios they played and the stages they played them in were pretty corny. And yes, the audience was as stiff as white people can get but the musicians kicked ass and European music would never be the same.

So sit back, i hope you can find a relaxed moment to take in some of the finest blues singers that ever lived!

Woody Guthrie knows

It's about that time again: 2011 rocked and i enjoyed every last minute of it. Thanks everyone for making that possible and may you all get your yaya's out during the holidays.

More of the same for everyone please, now is a fantastic time to live in. I'll see you all in 2012 and i'm leaving you with Woody Guthrie's new years resolution from 1942. Things were surely different back then, yet the truly important stuff remains the same..

Cheers!

Bukowski

“—you know, I’ve either had a family, a job,
some­thing has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have
a place and the time to
create.”

no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 chil­dren
while you’re on
wel­fare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crip­pled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawl­ing up your
back while
the whole city trem­bles in earth­quake, bom­bard­ment,
flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space
have noth­ing to do with it
and don’t create any­thing
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

My name is Lodewijk Duijvesteijn, nice to meet you.
I am a travelling photographer who loves nothing more than make portraits, landscapes and still lifes. On this blog i would like to share some of my everyday inspirations, show recent work and work that may not fit in my regular portfolio. So come on in and enjoy!

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