WEBVTT

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If you happen to like beautiful photographs,

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you probably won't like what I am going to say

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therefore, let's start where it all began,

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sometimes it makes it easier to think along.

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For me, it started with the work of a photographer;

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Arsath Ro'is,

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he worked for the Amsterdam municipality

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a civil servant,

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and his job was to record the changing city.

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Every morning he would take his moped

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and drive to the outskirts of Amsterdam --

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where the buildings sites were

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and the tunnels were digged and the ring road was built --

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There was always a lot of sand in his pictures

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and that's why the civil servants he worked with,

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called him the "sand photographer."

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You probably noticed already

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that there is a moped in every image --

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the story goes like this:

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one day Arsath Ro'is was taking a photo on a building site,

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and he was just focusing on his camera and the subject,

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and behind his back somebody was stealing his moped.

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(Laugher)

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And he swore never to leave his moped out of sight.

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(Laugher)

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So, what have we got here:

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we've got very straightforward photography,

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there are no artistic ambitions.

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Arsath Ro'is was not interested in taking interesting photographs,

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he just wanted to do his job

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and he didn't want his moped to be stolen again.

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And that is what makes him so authentic.

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Now I'll mention a photographer

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with artistic ambitions:

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there was a time that I was a photographer with artistic ambitions --

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(Laughter)

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You know, I had shows in galleries, and in museums,

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I made books, there were concepts,

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and projects and themes and series and subjects --

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I could have bought a moped

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(Laughter)

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and put it in every image that I took

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I could have adopted a surrealistic style, a straight forward style,

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I even could have had success with it,

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but it would have been just another concept,

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it would have been fake,

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and would not have been authentic at all.

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Isn't is weird that somebody working for the municipality

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is more authentic than an artist may ever be?

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Mind you, a civil servant, working from 9 to 5.

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There are two things that you can conclude from this:

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one thing is, it's dangerous to have artistic ambitions,

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they may prevent you from being authentic;

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second, if you really want to make interesting pictures,

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you shouldn't want to make them.

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Do you want me to repeat that?

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(Laughter)

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So, after I saw the work of Arsath Ro'is

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and I realised what it meant,

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I dropped the projects and the concepts,

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and the themes and the series and the subjects --

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I sold my equipment,

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I threw away half of my negatives,

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and the rest I sold to the Dutch Photo Museum,

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Nederlands Fotomuseum,

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and I persuaded them to put it

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downloadable for free on their web site, high res[olution]

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so you could make prints like this of it.

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Sometimes people send me a picture

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of what they have done with my picture --

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(Laughter)

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it may look that I'd done this

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all in a whim,

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but in fact it took me years to do it.

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But, man, what a relief.

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Finally I could see what there is to see.

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Most photography is not about seeing what there is to see,

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most photography is about presenting the world

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in a well composed way

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and that is not easy to do, because the world is very chaotic,

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and you have to be very skilled as a photographer to do it;

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and when you do it as a photographer, people say:

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"You are a good photographer! Look at this image,

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what a beautiful image, it's almost like a painting" --

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(Laughter)

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And it's not a modern painting it's not [unclear]

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it's old-fashioned, 17th, 18th century, 19th century painting.

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In 1816, a French naval ship named "The Medusa"

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sank to the bottom of the sea,

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and 147 seamen managed to get on a raft.

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They floated around for two weeks,

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many died, and eventually 15 seamen were saved.

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Two years later, in 1818,

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the French painter, Theodore Gericault painted this ordeal.

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And now we go to 2008,

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Georgian army invaded South Ossetia,

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the Russian army expelled them very soon,

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and this is a picture of soldiers

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retreating from South Ossetia --

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You see the connection?

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I can show a lot of pictures like this,

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with all this connection between painting and photography,

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but I'm not going to do it, I trust that you think alone.

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I'll only show this one:

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a picture I made myself in 1998,

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it is very popular, people like it very much,

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it's the most downloaded from the internet

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of the web site of the Nederlands Fotomuseum.

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Do you know why people like this picture?

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Because it resembles almost every picture

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of Caspar David Friedrich.

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(Laughter)

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And it's not on purpose that people like it,

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it's not on purpose that I made it this way,

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it's unaware,

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it's something we carry around with us,

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it's our cultural history.

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And of course in the beginning I liked it when people said:

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this is a beautiful picture,

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you are a good photographer.

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But there came a moment that I thought:

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I want to see what there is to see

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and not be dictated by painting all the time,

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old fashioned painting all the time.

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Can photography have a beauty of its own?

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And if beauty is too much to ask,

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can it be interesting on its own?

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Interesting -- if you really want to make interesting pictures,

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you shouldn't try to make them.

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So I stopped --

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This is a photography that falls on your doormat every week,

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it is inside the leaflets of the supermarkets.

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This is how supermarkets present the meat they offer,

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anybody thinking about photography now?

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Now you think of meat!

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This photography is so uninteresting,

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that you forget photography, you just think about the subject.

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and that is what makes it interesting to me.

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(Laughter)

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There is a big realm of things

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to discover in this area of photography.

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These are the ones I love the most.

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Everybody should have this picture on his desk,

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then you don't have to crack your brain anymore

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which size is bigger: A4, A3, A6 --

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(Laughter)

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So, I started to collect this kind of photography,

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but then I had to move to a smaller apartment,

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I mean, I was a photographer, I stopped photographies,

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it is going to cost you --

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And to fit in myself, I had to throw away a lot of stuff,

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and in the meantime, the pallets of uninteresting photographs

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were getting bigger and bigger,

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should I throw away the pallets of uninteresting photographs,

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or should I throw away

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the puppets my mother made in the old-peoples home?

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Every time she made a puppet --

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(Laughter)

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I'm just going to put a jacket on the remaining time.

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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Every time she made a puppet,

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she would show it to me and then said:

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"Do you like it?" "Mom, it's great!"

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and then she said, of course, "Do you want to have it?"

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and I said, "Yes, I'd really like to have it."

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So I got lots of this puppets in my house,

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I held them above the bin, but I couldn't let loose.

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It felt like betraying my mother's memory.

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Then I thought, memory, isn't photography about memory?

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So I bought a camera again,

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took pictures of the puppets of my mother,

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held them above the bin and could let loose.

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In that way I managed to throw away a lot of stuff.

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(Laughter)

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This is a childhood rocket,

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I mean, what does a big grown up man

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do with this stuff that is for children --

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I didn't throw it away, I gave it away.

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This is my television set,

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people of the television area don't have to worry,

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it is not going to be any E-trend,

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because it was taken away in a minute.

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I wrote on it : "Steal in order."

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And then I got a phone call from Foam Magazine,

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it is an international, notorious photography magazine,

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and they said, "We heard that you are in the possession of a camera again,"

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I said, "Yes, I have to confess,

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I am in the possession of a camera again."

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"What do you do with it?"

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I said, "Well, I just take pictures of things I throw away,"

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(Laughter)

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And they said, "We would like to see it"

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And before I knew, I had 24 pages in this magazine

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on things I threw away.

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(Applause)

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This, I didn't throw away,

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I found out that you can use photography also

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to prevent you from buying things you don't really need.

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(Laughter)

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Yeah.

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I managed to postpone buying this computer for a year,

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I just waited until a spilled a cup of coffee on the old one.

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And it was published in the beginning of 2008,

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the title was "Photography against consumerism."

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A few months later, the credit crisis started,

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so you can see what you can achieve with photography?

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If you skip the painting --

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So, I was back in business again, but not really,

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I was not really back in business,

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because I wasn't going to look for the next subject,

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and project, and theme and series and whatever,

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it just happened that I wanted to throw away stuff

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and photography seemed to help,

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so I just took pictures of it,

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I wasn't interested in making interesting pictures,

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I was just interested in throwing away stuff.

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So, then you start wondering,

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"What makes a picture interesting?"

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Do you think this is an interesting picture?

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It was taken half a year ago,

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a boy shot in a school, teachers and fellow students

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and then he shot himself,

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and among the things people put in front of the school,

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there was this panel in the background

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in English it says, "God, where were you?"

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Well, those questions are not easy to answer.

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There was another question as well,

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"Warum", which means "Why", in English,

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which is even more difficult to answer,

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and here we have the mysterious creator of this panels

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by the looks of him,

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he is not so interested in answering the questions

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but more in need of some attention.

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And that is what he was going to get.

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(Laughter)

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But I was wondering -- I have seen this guy before --

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and, do you know, the "R" in this panels

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and the question mark are very strange?

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in "Warum" as well,

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So, I did some research and I came across --

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do you remember, a year ago,

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this guy who put his daughter in a basement

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and made children with her in Austria? --

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Frittzel -- this is his house,

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and this is the mysterious creator,

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and now he writes, "How ever could it come to this?"

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and the "Warum" again is showed weirdly,

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it's something like "not again."

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And still, this was not his coming out,

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his coming out was in 2007, December the 17th,

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it was also in Germany,

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here, this woman had shot herself and her children

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and he put "Warum" and the old panels in front of the house,

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on the pavement,

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and two days later he managed to get them next to the door.

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But this is not the end.

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Do you remember this year Queen's Day?

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The third of April, this guy bumped into the crowd,

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and bumped into the monuments,

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among the things people put there

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to show their sympathy --

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(Laughter)

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Well, in a purely aesthetical, formal way,

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this is not beautiful photography,

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but there is something else in it,

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there is something to discover, there is something to find.

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And that is what we can call beauty too

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but it's another kind of beauty,

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it's not a beauty of the old fashioned painting,

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but it is a beauty of the scientific discovery,

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of the [mathemathical] formula,

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of the simple solution to a complicated problem,

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of investigation.

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And suddenly I found myself writing for "De Volkskrant,"

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it is a big dutch newspaper,

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analysing pictures in this investigative way that I just showed you.

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And this is what I wrote about the "Warum" guy

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and I was very happy that every week

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I could tell my story about photography

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in a different, not-paintily way,

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but it was one drawback,

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and it was that I only could show one picture

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I couldn't show my research,

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and then "De Volkskrant" came up

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with a very simple solution to this complicated problem.

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They gave me two pages instead of half a page,

00:15:39.681 --> 00:15:44.242
so now I can analyze complete stories on photography

00:15:49.412 --> 00:15:51.471
I've got more space for my research

00:15:51.471 --> 00:15:54.000
and I've got more space for myself,

00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:56.035
because I earn a bit more money,

00:15:56.035 --> 00:15:59.063
and I've moved to a bigger apartment.

00:15:59.063 --> 00:16:00.186
Thank you very much.

00:16:00.186 --> 00:16:02.373
(Applause)