Way ahead is a photographic series about how we meet our future. You can neither be in the future nor see the future, but you can have an idea of what the future will bring and see a diffuse picture of it in your head.
Idea-wise I was inspired by paintings of historic battles such as the Battle of Lützen, etc. Men rising up in the fog trying to see what has happened and where they are. These paintings have also inspired me from a design perspective, as they are often created in extreme horizontal formats. Long and narrow, these pictures give a sense of time and concurrently refer to the oblong screens of feature film. This horizontality also anchors the pictures to the ground, they become extreme landscape paintings. The cut of the images gives the feeling that you are sitting in a bunker looking out at the world.
While working with this series of photographs, the battle field feeling has become more and more a sense of uncertainty and optimism for the future. Meeting that which is to come with expectation.
The men are standing and sitting like figures in an architecture model. They are unreachable. They create perspective and direction in the diffuse landscape with their bodies. It is these directions – inwards towards themselves and outwards, forwards – that form the core of the work. A still movement.