Film & Animation

A collection of film clips

NTV

I do not think I will be regularly updating this section in the near future, since I am working on a new project, called NTV. For this project I will film and try to properly animate characters in Character Animator by Reallusion. It is something I have longed to do for quite some years, ever since I bought my first copy of Crazytalk on CD-ROM (!) years ago. My expertise level is amateur at best, but I do study a lot and I am making some progress.

Knowing that most people interested in my work do not speak Dutch, there is little or no space for that material on this site, but if you happen to understand the language, you are most welcome to follow me on NTV.

NTV, Nieuwmarkt

Amsterdam School of Burlesque

Amsterdam School of Burlesque

January 14th, 2018. Location: Boom! Chicago
Burlesque show by the the Amsterdam School of Burlesque
Video: 3:15 / 15 video stills

Roxy Diamond

Roxy Diamond

I am currently working on a series about Drag Queens. Gender diversity is a theme I have been working on since I started being serious about photography.

This time I am also really serious about the idea of publishing a book with material ranging from the 1970s up to 2018. My goal is to photograph at least a hundred Drag Queens, so expect this site to deliver a lot of images of Queens in the months to come.

Much like the series about Burlesque performers it is wonderful to work with people who have self-expression at the center of their art. That is quite the opposite of what I do in my work as a photographer where I often wish to be invisible.

Snow


 
It is almost genetic, I guess. I was brought up in a family with a super 8mm camera and later a video 8. It was mainly my mother’s hobby but my father had to push the buttons. I always doubted his true interest for film, because he did not use the camera very often. Unless of course, there was snow outside. My father could spend endless meters of expensive Kodak film just to document his car under a fresh deck of snow.

I am more into filming people and I do not own a car. That would be a real burden in an overcrowded city such as Amsterdam with little or no space to park the vehicle. Like my father I rarely film, but this seems to be changing lately. I grew very fond of the film options most modern camera have.

Here is my impression of Amsterdam during a few days of snow.

Russian Poetry Lesson

We do not always get along very well, but Alexander is my only real contact in Russia and I love the man. I worked with him on the first Russian Museum for Erotic Art, at the Novy Arbat, quite close to the Kremlin. I was amazed by the productivity of the Russian construction workers who built the largest museum of its kind in little over three months. I also fell in love with Moscow, the city I never wanted to visit before business took me there.

In my mind Moscow was painted in grays, but in reality I was amazed by the subtle use of color everywhere in the heart of old Moscow. This experience profoundly changed my way of working as a photographer. Suddenly, almost overnight I changed from black & white to color, although I never matched the subtlety of the Russian colors. My first visit was seven years ago and in 2016 I worked in Moscow for two full weeks and that was heaven.

Working with an interpreter at my side was not ideal and I decided to study Russian. I used to learn languages very fast but at age 61 I had to except that it was almost undoable for me to learn Russian. That really saddened me, especially since Alexander does not speak English and most of our fights start out with misunderstanding each other while using Google Translate during our long conversations on WhatsApp. So, look at this animation as therapy for me.

The 40th Anniversary of the Rockers series


I can hardly grasp it, but it is 40 years ago that I ditched the advertising agency I was doing product photography for and started working on the Rockers series. I made thousands of photographs and the project at first almost left me broke, but over the years it became my bestselling project. The photographs are still popular and at times I feel like an old rock band on a come back tour with a public shouting to do my first hit once over.

Of course I am also very proud of this series. During this series a certain style of portrait photography evolved and up to this day I am faithful to that photographic approach.

This is a good time to start thinking about a book and my friend Norm came over to Amsterdam to write some poetic prose about the subject and we made this short movie to hopefully encourage people to buy the book that will be published in 2018.