I had the privilege of asking the photography Arthur Van Erps some questions about his atmospheric photography!

Check out the interview below!

1. Tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a photographer? What inspires you to create?

I’ve always struggled a bit with what I want to do in life. I can’t seem to envision my future. The only real constant thing has been photography. It was actually my mom who inspired me to be a photographer. She and my dad have a feverish passion for travel and my mom wanted a way to capture it all. From a young age I started travelling alongside them and once I started developing my own sense of visuality, I was the designated photographer. I then borrowed her camera more and more, creating an innate desire to photograph journeys.

2. Did you study photography or are you self taught? What are your thoughts on art education and are there any skills you think people need to have to be a photographer?

Choosing a topic of studying was not the easiest. The curse and blessing that falls upon post-war generations is reaping the benefits of capitalism while at the same time being a slave to it. I tried a few things before settling on what clearly should have been my first choice all along… photography. Art education isn’t necessary, this is proven by the ton of successful people that have had no official schooling.  But art education is beneficiary in a beautiful way. It’s a safe environment to explore and experiment, fall and rise again.

3. What is the most challenging part of being a photographer and are there any misconceptions about being a photographer you don’t like?

For me the most challenging part is participating in the cultural scene, the networking and getting eyes on your work is the most important condition in becoming a successful photographer. Being able to sell your work and position yourself as an artist, the rhetorical part of it all, is as much part of the job as photographing itself. Yet that part can sometimes seem trivial to me, I always tell myself the work should speak for itself. I realize that this is quite a naïve look on how art should work in the world. Art, like most things, is a commodity and falls under the same principles as other materialistic stuff. If you don’t create a desiring supply there will be no demand. Not playing the game has limited the number of eyes and thus the amount of acknowledgement (we artists do like appraisal). But that doesn’t stop me from creating art for myself… In the meanwhile, I’m working on being less of an awkward penguin.

4. On your website, you’ve split your work into three different projects; Structures, Foliage and Heimwee. Can you talk a little bit about each project and what inspired you to create them? What kind of themes and questions do you like to explore within your work and do you prefer to work on long or short term projects?

Structures and Foliage are mere placeholders, they signify a way to categorize my collection of images and should not be seen as a project. Confusing, I know. I’m working on clarifying this! Heimwee is a long-term project, it started when I got out of art school. It’s basically an ode to my own nostalgia. I wondered if this would be legible as having universal sensitivity, if others could decipher my work and could feel what I was feeling when standing in front of the scene with my camera. In order to find this out I put my project on a crowdfunding platform with the wish of creating something physical that could end up into people’s hands. The response was better than I could have ever imagined. A five years project ended in the most beautiful compliment.

Creating Heimwee felt like second nature, working on something so intensly personal and undefined (in terms of parameters) for so long leaves this void by having completed it. A vacuum for what’s about to come next. I’m intrigued myself by what lays ahead… Will I be able to reinvent myself? Can I create that next chapter in my artists book or will I get writer’s block?

5. I think that your work is really intriguing, and looking through each project, I get an overall sense of longing and searching for something meaningful and intangible, as if you’re trying to find a sense of belonging.

It’s interesting that you photograph places that are mostly empty and visually quiet. What kind of locations are you drawn to and where would be your dream location to shoot?

Also, how do you think that shooting in such ambiguous locations engages the viewer and do you prefer the viewer to complete the narrative of an image?

First of all, thank you for that lovely description. As for the “longing and searching”, you’re spot on. I haven’t quite found my place yet, as an individual on this planet nor as an artist in the cultural scene. I’m unsure if I will ever find that spot, which feels uneasy but that feeling of unease also makes me create. I create to understand and creating lessens the unease (temporarily).

I like locations in which I feel foreign, locations where I’m an unknown. The feeling of being anonymous makes you walk around a bit differently, like you’re part of an alien-visitor relationship. And in that dynamic, I tend to use my camera as a probe, to scope out the region and capture its vacant essence. Even the most crowded of places are filled with a quiet. I like to make the comparison that my images are like walking into an empty theatre, stories have taken place but all that remains is an abandoned stage and its props. In the same sense I don’t necessarily feel the story that has transpired is the only story. The viewer doesn’t contain a singular viewpoint, I think nostalgic emptiness allows for a multitude of narratives, just all soaked in a kind of subtle sadness. I think that’s the only thing I force on the viewer… a hint of gloom.

6. Why are landscapes in art so important and what do you think we can learn by studying the environment around us?

Also, do you shoot, or would you ever consider shooting, environmental portraits and is there anything you’d like to do with your work that you haven’t done yet?

I tend to shoot environments as if they were a portrait. As a faceless entity, our habitat has been around for longer than we have. A tree has seen and experienced more than any of us. I think us humans, aren’t inherently destroyers, but somewhere along the way we started taking more than we were giving back. We’ve lost the connection to our natural world by cocooning ourselves. Our neighbours are no longer trees, we’ve become our own neighbours. We’ve become detached of what it means to be in symbiosis. We won’t be able to find our way back if we’re not at least aware of this reality. Ideally my work enables others to find the humanity in earth. To find poetry in rock shaped by centuries of slow rubbing shoulders with each other.

7. One of the most discussed topics in the world of photography is that of film vs digital photography. What are your thoughts on both methods of image making, do you prefer to use to film or digital photography within your work and do you think that the current rise in film photography is a good or bad thing for the future of photography?

Additionally, what are your thoughts about editing images and do you think that editing an image changes the veracity of the photograph? Should a photograph depict real life or should it become its own slice of reality?

I look at the rise in popularity as a positive development for film photography, it can only help re-democratize the medium and help financially cheapen the whole process. Anything that pushes it out of the niche-corner it was forced into by the medium of digital photography. That being said, I personally don’t have a preference, I see benefits in both. Film makes me more conscious of each frame and slows me down on a technical level. Digital makes me more experimental and allows for more post-production fine-tuning. I use both, but due to the cost of film I tend to grab my digital camera more often.

I have a weird relationship with the truthfulness of an image. I never manipulate the scenes I encounter on my walks. For some reason that would feel like blasphemy and yet no one would be privy to any alteration I would have made on scene. I tend to keep my editing pretty lowkey as well, I spend most of my post-production time adding the atmosphere I saw and felt at the time of capturing, adding that what was lost by the cleanliness of digital. Bringing in a touch of impressionism.

On the other hand, I have no qualms with other photographers creating a narrative or fabricating a fictitious story. Photography can offer both. A raw, honest display of reality and a raw, honest display of fantasy. After all, all artists are storytellers. And it might be something I experiment with in the future.

8. What is your photo shoot process like? Do you typically have an idea of where or what you’re going to shoot or are you more spontaneous with your images?

How many images do you typically shoot and what is your image selection process like? What do you do with all of the unpublished work?

Additionally, can you talk about the challenges you face whilst shooting outside on location and how it differs whilst shooting at night and shooting during the day? How do you make sure that you and your equipment stay safe?

Also, are you more of a technical or intuitive photographer and how important is it for your work to be technically correct?

I didn’t need to be intentional in my creative process with Heimwee, it’s like having thoughts, it came to me instinctively. Technicality isn’t an unimportant element in photography, but it no longer plays a significant role in my image-taking. Once you find a way of working the tool, it becomes just that, a tool and nothing more. But being more deliberate in the creative process is something I miss. It takes me back to art school, where you came up with an idea, tried to execute it, getting told it sucks and then turning first failures into something that’s able to stand on its own. Like cultivating a bunch of seeds into a few saplings into a couple of trees.

The selection process and post-production is a time-consuming undertaking, but one that brings me immense creative pleasure. I love that photography gives me two worlds, one where I’m in the open air, searching for visuals and utilizing my body, mind and camera as an outlet. And one where I’m inside, listening to music and flooding my brain with my own images, looking inward and getting into that mysterious state that’s called ‘flow’. Something happens when I sit down with my images and music, time ceases to be an element. Hours and hours go by without me noticing.

9. At the time of writing, we are still in the midst of the global pandemic, Covid-19. How has this pandemic affected you and your practice?

Also, do you think that moving forward, the photographic community will change in a positive way, and have you noticed any changes within the last year or so?

During the lockdown I thought I would lose the ability to travel and explore. And with it, I thought my camera would be left untouched to collect dust. But I found myself gravitating to film more than before the pandemic. I hopped on a bike with my medium format camera in my backpack and did the same route almost every other day (we were allowed to take up sports outside but in a certain radius). I think decoupling the instant of digital was necessary for me during that time. Not paying attention on an end image and focussing in on the therapeutic part of photography. Using it solely as something that makes you pause, get of your bike, breathe and a way to frame what you see.

Much has been written about the impact of Covid-19 on the profession of photography. It will doubtlessly affect the community and photography as a whole, because the pandemic changed the very fabrics of culture and societal living. And photography as a medium is used to capture our way of living and the events we go through. In a less grand scheme way of looking at things, I have friends whose jobs got taken away from them. Some adapted and hustled, some lost very valuable time and money.

10. We live in a very visually saturated world, with access to an abundance of imagery. Do you think that this increase in access to images has changed the way people relate to images?

Additionally, do you think that the rise of influencers or content creators has changed the way that people now engage with the creation and perception of art?

An abundance of anything in a human’s life can’t be healthy… We shouldn’t consume too much sugar nor images. Yet both are incredibly delicious. Photographs and videos are one of the easiest methods to escape, it’s a very visual, low-bar way of getting out of your own head. But it becomes a matter of contention when the amount of supply gets so big it affects the way you’re looking. I recognize this in myself as well. Instagram, for example, has designated looking at visual art to a shorter time frame than it would take me in a regular museum or gallery space. I figured that was because of the physicality, being near an actual print. Hence why I feel a self-made pressure to work more in tangible ways as of late, in a world filled with the ephemeral the real shouldn’t get lost. But it turns out these apps and the trickery they use have shortened our attention span. It seems we first secluded ourselves from the natural world by concreting ourselves in and now we’re secluding ourselves from the actual, real world (insert scene dystopian future from Wall-e)!

Influencers and content creators are using the way the world works right now to their advantage. It’s a new form of profession, they’re doing the same as you and me, trying to make a living. But unlike most professions, they do bear some responsibility, they are holding out a megaphone and should think twice about what to blast out into the world. With that influence also comes a certain power over what art is commercially viable and thus on how artists create. What used to be a curator’s or critic’s job now sometimes falls into the hands of someone with a different background. People can choose who to listen to and who to trust with value assessment. But one thing that won’t change is art being created outside of the profit-making (like-inducing, comment-worthy) realm, expression for the sake of expression will be eternal.

11. Social media has completely revolutionised the way that people view and interact with art and photography. What are your thoughts about social media and is it something you enjoy using? 

Oops. See answer above.

12. It’s quite important for photographers, or any creative, to have a sense of belonging to some sort of community. Do you feel like you are part of a larger art community and how do you determine what kind of feedback is useful to your progression as a photographer? What kind of feedback do you value and how do you know who to listen to?

Unfortunately, I lack the social skills to swim in large groups of people, network and make myself heard. This has made me feel angsty about trying to navigate the art community. I wish I was taken under the wing of a mentor. But undertaking nothing has made me feel very secluded from the art community, this while I know it must be a hotbed of inspiration, stimulation and creation. Banging my head against a wall. But softly, because that shit hurts.

What I do have is a smaller, tight-knit community of friends from art school. They are the ones I go to when I run into a creative question mark. I tend to not gage feedback from what Instagram has to offer, the number of likes shouldn’t evaluate the work you do and yet it does puzzle me. Why do certain images garner the attention they do? And others not?

13. Do you shoot images with an audience in mind, and would you say that you create for yourself or for others?

How does the internet impact the way you create work, and do you find yourself changing your work on the suggestions of others?

Also, how do you try and make sure that you engage viewers beyond a simple like, so that they are invested in your art and have you ever used social media ads to market your work?

Sure, I get subconsciously influenced by the artists I like and by what others tell me they like about my work. But it’s not something I actively think about when creating, so I would say I create for myself but with the hope that it’s readable and enjoyable for others.

I tend not to take myself so seriously, partly due to insecurity about my work and partly because of the huge stick in the collective artist’s butt. There’s a tendency to get quite high-brow in the visual arts, a form of elitist eye-sport. Photography, for me, shouldn’t be a hard-to-understand language but a beautiful way of universal communication. I’ve always combined my work on social media with either poetry, humour or background information. Sharing and evoking feelings.

A banana stuck to a gallery wall can exist too and surely contains a message but deciphering it demands a certain visual literacy that not everyone has. I love to consume and create democratizing art.

14. Is it important for an artist to have a message in their work and, if so, how do you find the balance between creating work that is meaningful to others, whilst being personal and engaging for you?

Also, how often do you search for inspiration and do you ever feel the pressure to create more work as your career has progressed?

15.  Do you think that an artist’s work should be constantly evolving or do you think they should create what sells? How has your own work changed since you first started and is art worth creating if it’s not commercial?

I feel I’ve answered questions 14 and 15 in some shape or form in other answers.

16. If you could curate a gallery show in which you exhibited alongside 3 other artists, who would you choose to exhibit with and what theme would you pick?

Since this is a completely hypothetical situation, I’m choosing the photographers that I would dream to be included with. A sort of spoken out loud wish.

Photographers whose work are at the same time highly subjective and yet tend to have an abstaining, registering quality about them.  A collection of images that are often deprived of human figures, yet filled with human feelings and thoughts. Images that pose the viewer with questions rather than answers. Basically, these photographers share similar DNA in the sense that they combine the autobiographical with the documental. And thus, the theme I would choose is the border between those two worlds.

Dirk Braeckman is an important Belgian photographer and internationally lauded artist, whose images I was smitten with when in art school. His work is characterized by the return of several subjects: female nudes, curtains, empty corners in rooms, walls, abandoned hotel rooms, etc. They are suggestive without being drenched in symbolism, this visuality was a huge influence on my formation as a photographer. He showed me a different side of the medium, photographs that illicit nostalgic feelings within the viewer. This is would be something that I would try to emulate myself.

Alex Catt is a photographer I’ve recently discovered on the interwebs, his images struck me immediately. They convey both the atmosphere of the actual scene and an intimate look into the artist’s mind. The pair of which working symbiotically to create subtle visual poetry. There isn’t a ton of information out there about his body of work but it’s clear he’s documenting his journey. Catt is capturing the process of getting lost, finding pieces of himself and unabashedly letting us in on it.

The last photographer, Richard Misrach, like the first, is someone who’s been greatly influential to the photographer community as a whole. He documents places and locations and has been doing so for over 40 years. His longest series Desert Cantos displays the dramatic desert landscapes as if they were foreign relics, like he’s an alien visiting our planet and collecting data on our weird relationship to the natural world. In that sense he’s more topographical and less biographical than the rest, but the thought-invoking mechanisms that happen within the audience are similar.

17. In your opinion, what makes a good piece of art? What was the last image/piece of media that captivated you and what was it about it that left an impression on you?

The most recent piece of art that captured my attention was Bodybuilding Mirrors by Sofia Eriksson. The effect of fluidity and disforming the space around it and then projecting it back to the viewer made me pause. I had to look up who the artist was and why she made what she made. Eriksson explains on her website that the mirrors fade the line between reality and illusion. For me a piece of art needs to strike that balance between arousing curiosity and narrating a story. It should tell you something but hide way more.

18. One of the biggest considerations amongst creatives is the concept of originality and the idea of creating work that is unique to you. Do you consider your work to be original and what are your thoughts on originality in art?

The prolific nature of visual arts these days is quite scary. It feels like every concept has been thought of and executed. The artist sea is big and it’s easy to feel like plankton instead of a big fish. But the urge to express is usually bigger than that fear for me.

Originality in art doesn’t really exist, art has been around as long as man, we build upon and get built upon. That isn’t to say that new ways of framing and portraying subjects don’t exist, they do and should be lauded. But even at its most extreme (e.g. realism and surrealism) rejecting an idea means acknowledging it at the same time.

19. What do you like to do when you’re not painting or creating art and what do you think your work says about you?

I escape life like most people, whether it be through books, movies or consuming art. I lose some time scrolling on Instagram. I lose track of time when walking. And time doesn’t seem to pass when working out. Trying to be a well-balanced human being.

My work reveals a longing for belonging. I think it feels like going on a journey, in the wake of someone else, following in unknown footsteps, seeing what’s left behind and hearing the quiet. If my interpretation of how people look at my imagery is right then I think it reveals a certain soft heartache yet a love and openness for earthly vulnerability.

20. What are you currently working on and where can people find more about you and your work?

I’m currently working on some smaller projects, meandering my way out of the vacuum that’s left behind by Heimwee. I feel creative juices flowing again but the path forward is still a bit unclear. So, the next step is exploring those different projects, going through some duds to find a diamond.

People can find me on Instagram @arthurve or through my website www.arthurvanerps.com, which I’m redesigning as we speak.