Joep Hijwegen

Existential Street Photography

While shot candidly and spontaneously, my images do not seek to document that which is on the other side of the lense. They are crafted to reflect things I long for, things I fear and things that bring me comfort. I hope to show you that nostalgia, love, mystery and terror, the things we usually seek in cinema or recreations of reality, can also be found in the everyday. Photography is a way of creating meaning and celebrating the individual perspective. It is about showing that there is something incredibly and powerfully beautiful in the fact that we are ultimately alone in our experience. A camera gives us the freedom to, through nothing but simple directed observance, turn everyday life into everything we want it to be. I call this existential street photography, primed to express the individual and subjective. Like the philosophy of the same name, it is concerned primarily with the concept of radical freedom and the construction of meaning. Life to me is about a story or narrative that we ourselves have to create. There’s a dual movement where I hope to – through my individual perspective – turn particular elements of life into something universally meaningful, placing myself and the viewer into a bigger narrative. Through layering, abstraction and distorted contact with the other side, I want spectators to feel like they are looking at a movie still, enforcing the idea of life as something directed by us. With colors and shapes borrowed from painters such as Manet and Hopper as well as from sci-fi films of the late 20th century, I hope to reinforce a subjective take on reality, setting it apart from the registrational character of more documentarian street photography. These two disparate visual influences also try to bring across the idea of the present as how we experience it being the result of both past and future, and by our struggle to define ourselves apart from them.