I finished my first year.... Wow!

_{From my bed}

Hi guys! It's been a while! I thought it was time for a bit of an update. And I have been thinking this for a few months now. Hope you don't mind that it took a while...

Anyway. I managed to finish my first year of photography school!! Who would have thought?
The second part was much harder than the first half. It was winter and I wasn't feeling very creative. The assignments didn't feel like my cup of tea. I just wanted to stay in bed and get it over with.

Deadlines were coming closer and closer and I finished my year with my camera in a BDSM dungeon with a mistress and a client. Those photos are a bit too much to post on my blog... but the feedback I got was "You got really close to the action, I see!".

It wouldn't be very nice to just tell you about projects and not show you anything, so let me show you some of my other photos that were part of larger series, that I haven't posted yet:

I went back to the place where I grew up to make a series about time that seems to be standing still. I stayed with my best friend for a whole day and took a lot of photos of her family and what they would do all day. And when the kids were at school, it was time to catch up and explore the boring part of the town. So much old stuff is there laying around when you just pay attention!

I got inspired by the #metoo activity going on in the Netherlands and decided to make small series called "Piece of meat", using blurry polaroids of female body parts to represent that fleeting and low-quality sexual satisfaction one must feel when sexually harassing someone.

Many of our assignments are some sort of follow-up on previous ones. Just like Self-portrait 2 should be built on the first self-portrait we made. There are also many variants of "Street" assignments. The last time I showed crime in my own street. Now it was time to show other activities in a street nearby. So I went to the Albert Cuyp Market and focussed on the huge amount of street food that is eaten there.

I won't bore you with some of the other photos that I took. The rest doesn't stick well to the blog. One project was presented in VR and one other was with paint over a photo. And to be honest, they are not my most impressive works.

So what is next? I considered quitting school after 1 year. My energy was super low and I was not enjoying myself. I was hungry to experiment, but the vast amount of assignments didn't leave much time to try new stuff and fail (hard) at it.

The risk of quitting temporarily is that it will easily turn into quitting completely. And since I didn't want that yet, I decided to continue. Maybe take it a bit slower and not force myself as much.

This year we will have to figure out how we want to specialize. I am leaning towards #autonomous photography. That way I will be able to keep experimenting and explore the world of mixed media (yup... it's happening). The first half I will do another project in VR, and will play around with cameraless photography techniques. My house became a massive laboratory...LOL

To be continued!!