Interviews

"As an artist you have a choice what you create, and I always wanted to make pictures that would use beauty and touch people and move them and inspire them."
—David LaChapelle (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"I will always have problems because I’m a self-made photographer. When you are an autodidact, you learn only from your mistakes. So, I learn a lot."
—Audrey Tautou (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“One moment, you have no clue what some piece of mathematics is saying or how it’s working, and suddenly there’s like this neurological shift and it clicks into place.”
—Dr. Holly Krieger (John Adams Institute)
read more →

"A computer doesn’t emotionally interpret the picture. It sees a woman, it sees a child, and maybe it can recognise ‘grieving’ because it knows from all the other pictures that it’s supposed to be grieving, but it doesn’t feel anything."
—Max Pinckers (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"School is supposed to be a place to learn, not a place to compete and get the highest scores. It’s a place to let a child discover who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are.”
—Rina Mae Acosta (John Adams Institute)
read more →

"Some scientific discoveries have come from looking at something that seems to be – at that moment – irrational and then discovering that it’s not that irrational. So, the earth isn’t flat, it’s a sphere."
—Klaus Pichler (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"It’s not my aim to make statements about the idea of distance, but rather to question it. Much of my work is personal and comes from a point of feeling. To me, practice is a means of sense-making, and of being-in-the-world."
—Katrin Koenning (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"They’re in a lot of ways trapped not only in male bodies but in male identities. [...]They did a really good job of putting a masculine identity on themselves, because that’s what was dictated. At Esprit, they’re taking it off."
—Jessica Dimmock (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"The effect of seeing affluent lifestyles on television has been proven to a) make people think more people have that kind of lifestyle than really do, so it’s a distorted view of what’s normal but b) it also stimulates desire for those things."
—Lauren Greenfield (John Adams Institute)
read more →

"It’s easier not to be so beautiful, to be able to move through life a bit under the radar, and to be able to focus on what you feel really matters, rather than have to deal with the distraction of other people’s intense focus on your appearance."
—Sage Sohier (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“It’s weird, though, because I’m not doing this for fame and glory. I don’t want to do it for myself, I want to be a vehicle. I want to be the vehicle through which speaks little whispers of God.”
—Lake Montgomery (Riding the Dragon)
read more →

“I’m probably one of the luckiest people in the world to have a job that is absolutely fulfilling. It's super exhausting, it’s very demanding, but it’s extremely rewarding.”
—Lisa Johnston (Riding the Dragon)
read more →

“The future is our shared responsibility in the present.”
—Amy Webb (John Adams Institute)
read more →

"Somebody wants the experience of completely giving up responsibility – in every way. [...] You give it up, and you can go to this place they call ‘subspace’, which is somewhere in your head apart from your body."
—Elizabeth Heyert (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“I guess with any creative person, you’ve always got this bombardment of insecurity when you’re analyzing your own work. So there’s always some sort of insecurity with it, but that’s what pushes you to your next project because you’ve never really solved the use of the blank piece of paper.”
—Mandy Smith (TEDxAmsterdam)
read more →

"When an image is duplicated a lot, then we recognize it as an archetype, so then we duplicate it a lot. And then because it’s duplicated a lot, it’s being viewed a lot, and this has an influence in our brain."
—Coralie Vogelaar (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"By the time you see the world, you’re seeing it through the lens of your language."
—Lera Boroditsky (John Adams Institute, 2016)
read more →

"I wanted a picture that was more the visual equivalent of speaking."
—Stephen Shore (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“We all have to deal with the deepest and most difficult questions in life – no matter how nice our wardrobe is, or no matter how good our education is, or no matter how packed our social schedule is.”
—Jay McInerney (John Adams Institute)
read more →

“It’s sad to see people whose lives think for them, instead of the inverse. We have to think our life, we have to build it, we have to sculpt life. And time. We have to do something interesting with time.”
—Pierre Liebaert (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“Well, the image of a cowboy is basically a young dude. A rascal, a solitary hero. And then I’m showing these two little girls who do exactly as the big cowboys can do. They are so handy and brave."
—Karoliina Paatos (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"I came to the understanding pretty quickly that social media and the internet put into place a real predatory dynamic, where basically it motivated people to take video of other people to put up on YouTube to get shares, likes or comments."
—Doug Rickard (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“Normally, in public, I wouldn’t really cry, or I wouldn’t show you, because I don’t know you. But if I can capture the tear, and image it, and tell a little bit about the moment, I open up and I can maybe connect with you without actually crying in public.”
—Maurice Mikkers (TEDxAmsterdam)
read more →

“Emotions are never caused by external events but rather by how we appraise certain events.”
—Ad Vingerhoets (TEDxAmsterdam)
read more →

“I started to realize that there was a language that women share with each other and oftentimes it’s really hard to describe. And so I thought, well, if it’s so hard to describe, then maybe photographs will really articulate it.”
—Karen Marshall (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“You never know when you’ll need a favour from a tiger.”
—Álvaro Laiz (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“Well, look, the idea of doing pictures is not to have arguments, ok?”
—Bruce Gilden (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“The pictures also should be like a truth or an essence, and things that are truths or essences are also difficult to talk about; they just are.”
—Roger Ballen (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"All I wanted to do was move, if I wasn’t moving I wasn’t doing and I would get sad and lose direction, always moving."
—Mike Brodie (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“I don’t want it going out of the darkroom unless I’m happy with it, you know? I don’t want to give people work that’s not up to my standards, and my standards are high. I’m tough on myself, I think I overdo it.”
—Pablo Inirio (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"I don't think now it's a question of documenting the world as it is, because basically we know how it is. [...]The point is not just to document, it's the way you document and the interactive process you develop between you and the world."
—Patrick Zachmann (Eyes in Progress)
read more →

“The museum is clearly not a perfect environment to enjoy the deeper meanings of the art it collects. It is like a filing cabinet which holds love letters. We are grateful to the cabinet, but we know the love letters were not made to be read or held in such circumstances.”
—Alain de Botton (TEDxAmsterdam)
read more →

“I couldn’t escape knowing and feeling the original purpose of the rooms, and the unavoidable tension of what the space had been, compared to what surrounded me.”
—Emily Kinni (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“One ends up feeling excluded, standing outside a window looking in, fantasising about being part of the group. And being part of the group is important.”
—Nikolas Ventourakis (GUP Magazine)
read more →

“You still have to work and struggle. Effort and reward—they’re all intertwined. You can’t really look at struggle as necessarily a negative thing. Or work. The word ‘work’ can seem kind of like drudgery, but you can’t look at it like that.”
—Steve McCurry (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"That’s part of the object of it, it should move through hands. As many hands as possible."
—Megan M. Garr (KNiK)
read more →

"I have a certain amount of guilt for what I've done with these pictures and the way I've thrown 'em around and splattered these poor women in front of everybody, and sometimes I think I'm wrong and then I sometimes think I'm right, and that's what I live with, you know?"
—Scot Sothern (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"You may agree or disagree with my perspective but you'll know if I'm being honest about my perspective, and I think that is the thing that we can recognize in an image."
—Christopher Anderson (GUP Magazine)
read more →

"If I die tomorrow, I won’t learn anything, I won’t feel anything. If I want to stay alive, I have to protect myself so, the way I see it, the only choice we have as human beings is to put ourselves in the condition to keep trying as much as we can."
—Antoine d'Agata (GUP Magazine)
read more →