My friends, fellow artists and countrymen: The Volkskrant and NPS are organising the amateur artcontest Het Vierkante Ei for the second time and also this time you can register a single artwork to participate in a national contest that will be held in some of the finest galleries and museums in the country. Please read the newsarticle about it: Het Vierkante Ei: Your work in a museum!. Please the newsarticle and tell your fellow deviants about this. It's a really great contest and a fine opportunity.


I have been wondering for a long while now why I am so adverse to making artistic photos with my digital camera, opposed to the more journalistic shots I have been making for the past year. I can never feel much satisfaction with a digital artistic photo. Neither of myself or others. If I see that a wonderful photo was taken with a digital camera, my admiration goes down a few notches. Why?

Partially because a digital camera has more options to perfectly calculate a shot. You can not only make exposures that are technically perfect, but also control a lot more aspects of the photo more accurately. This in contrast to my classic analogue cameras, where there is always much larger margin of error and therefor room for experimentation.

Surely you can experiment with a digital camera too, but here's the real kicker, the thing that has been bothering me for a year and I wasn't even fully aware of it: any experiment in digital photography will have instant results. You immediately know what you did and what happened. If it doesn't suit you, you can throw it away and never bother with it again. Analogue photography is different in two aspects on this front: the results are never instant. Even a polaroid takes time to develop fully, if it is ever really fully developed (a completely different case). Results on regular film stay hidden until you've developed them or worse: had them developed.

Having a roll of film that hasn't been developed yet is pretty much the most stressful time for me. What's in that little can? A masterpiece? Complete rubbish? Has the camera malfunctioned again? Have I malfunctioned? And if so, what could have happened to the film? What the hell is going on in there?

Especially this past year I have faced a lot of disappointments in this area, ironically combined with the acquisition of a perfectly well operating and trustworthy Canon EOS 400D. I made wonderful photos of *AtarAtis just before she went off again, I made some great photos of =mirrorTEA when she was visiting here. Some fun expeditions with ~Samuran. Or at least, I think the photos would have been nice if only I hadn't respectively operated with a broken camera or mishandled the rewinding mechanism. Things like that make you just want to burn right to the ground.

It's horrible. So dump those old carrions and use your new camera, you could say. But I won't. And I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe I feel that art should have an element of Fate in it. Something we think we can control but can't. Maybe I am trying to teach myself about failing and what it feels like. Or maybe I just like to dream about what those photos could have been if only I hadn't screwed them up, willingly fuelling the regret of lost work, like looking through photoalbums of lost loved ones.

I don't know. And I don't know what will come of the roll I brought away to be developed yesterday. But it's certainly exciting. My very own Russian Roulette.