But a place is never only what ends up inside the frame.⁣

I met so many people while I was there. People who welcomed me, talked to me, laughed with me, taught me about their island and their lives. I sat down and shared food. I watched hands reaching into the same dish. I listened. I learned. And there was a great deal of laughter.⁣

⁣The central photograph in my Zanzibar series is called Carried.⁣
I chose that title because it can mean so many things.⁣

The cloth is carried by the wind.⁣
A body carries fabric.⁣
Women carry food, water, children, work, histories, traditions.⁣
We carry what has been passed on to us.⁣

⁣But looking back at these photographs, I realise there is another meaning too.⁣

𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝.⁣

Carried by the generosity of the people I met. By their openness, their stories, their humour, their willingness to let me spend time with them.⁣

So although you won’t see their faces on my wall at Hungry Eye, they are there.⁣
Invisible perhaps, but very much part of Sea Rags.⁣
These are some of them. ⁣

Hungry Eye Photo Art Fair⁣
2–6 September 2026 · Kromhouthal, Amsterdam
(tickets available)

Two weeks from now, the doors of the Hungry Eye Photo Art Fair will open in Amsterdam.

I have known this was coming for months, of course. But there is a curious moment in the preparation for an exhibition when something that has existed mainly in lists, measurements, emails and files suddenly becomes very, very real.

For me, that moment came last week, when the finished works arrived at my studio.

There they were: the photographs I have been looking at on screens for so long, now printed large on Hahnemühle paper, beautifully framed in dark oak, leaning against the walls and waiting to travel to Amsterdam.

And apparently, making the photographs was only the beginning.

There have been test prints and final print decisions. Paper choices. Frames. Measurements and wall plans. Titles and edition sizes. Certificates of Authenticity. Price lists. An entire paper administration for every single numbered edition. Business cards. Art cards. QR codes. A newsletter sign-up system. Texts for the wall. Texts for the website. Packaging. Labels. And quite a few things I had never realised one needed until one suddenly needed them.

My dining table has, at various moments, looked less like a dining table and more like the administrative headquarters of a very small museum.

And I am not finished yet.

But underneath all those practical preparations is something rather wonderful: the work is ready.

At Hungry Eye I will bring together two bodies of work in which textile plays an important role: Sea Rags, photographed on Zanzibar, and Hanbok, photographed in Korea. The large works Carried and Becoming will meet at the centre of my five-metre wall, with smaller works from both series around them.

And there will be a great deal more to see than my wall

Hungry Eye is devoted entirely to fine-art photography and describes itself as a boutique art fair with the atmosphere of a museum. The photography ranges from vintage work to contemporary practice and emerging talent, and the Amsterdam edition has a particular emphasis on experimentation and new approaches to the medium.

More than 50 independent artists are being given a platform at the 2026 fair, alongside established photography and new talent. There will also be a photography book market and a presentation connected to Fresh Eyes, which selects emerging photographers from around the world.

So this is certainly not an occasion on which you need to come, look politely at my nine photographs and go home again.

You could quite happily disappear into photography for several hours.

I have two tickets to give away

And I thought it would be much nicer to give them to someone here than to keep them sitting in an envelope.

So:

Would you like to visit Hungry Eye?

Tell me in the comments below who you would bring with you.

I will pick one of you and send you two tickets for the fair. No complicated competition, no sharing or tagging required. Just follow me here and leave me a comment below.

I would be delighted if those tickets ended up with two people who genuinely love photography and would enjoy spending a few hours wandering around the fair.

Hungry Eye Photo Art Fair
2–6 September 2026
Kromhouthal, Amsterdam-Noord

The public days are Thursday 3 through Sunday 6 September; Wednesday 2 September is the invitation-only preview and opening.

And now I must get back to my lists.

Two weeks.

It is becoming very real.

— Mirjam

I like it that way. I have no intention of tidying it up too much.

But over time I realised that I also wanted a quieter, more focused place for the work that comes directly from my studio. So I have created a new section within CARTE BLANCHE: FROM THE STUDIO.

This is where I will share new photographic work, exhibitions, works in progress, print releases and occasional notes about the making and presentation of my photographs. Sometimes that may mean a finished image. At other times, a contact sheet, a frame arriving from the maker, a wall being measured, an old archive being opened again, or the story of how a body of work slowly found its form.

A small note about subscriptions

If you already subscribe to CARTE BLANCHE, you have been added to FROM THE STUDIO as well. New subscribers will also receive posts from this section by default.

You remain in control of what arrives in your inbox. In your Substack subscription settings, you can choose which sections of CARTE BLANCHE you would like to receive by email — or turn individual sections off while remaining subscribed to the publication.

So if you are mainly here for the photography, FROM THE STUDIO is the one to keep switched on.

And if you also happen to enjoy an occasional detour involving a French garden, a journey, a loaf of bread or an unreasonable quantity of plums, the rest of CARTE BLANCHE will still be there too.

First from the studio: Hungry Eye Amsterdam

There could hardly be a better moment to open this new section.

From 2–6 September 2026, I will be exhibiting at Hungry Eye Amsterdam in the Kromhouthal.

For this presentation I am bringing together two bodies of work in which textile plays a central role, but in very different ways.

Sea Rags, made on the coast of Zanzibar, grew from my fascination with pieces of fabric washed ashore and altered by salt, water, sand and time. What once had a practical life gradually becomes something else — almost an abstract landscape.

Alongside it I will show work from my Korean Hanbok series, where cloth carries an entirely different history: one of craftsmanship, ceremony, identity and transformation.

Bringing these two worlds together on one wall has occupied much of my studio life in recent months — selecting, printing, framing, measuring, changing my mind, measuring again.

Over the coming weeks I will share some of that process here.

For now, consider this the door to the studio.

Welcome.

There is a particular kind of abundance that belongs only to late summer.

It arrives quietly. One morning you walk into the orchard, coffee still warm in your hands, and notice that the branches have begun to bow. Not from wind, but from fruit. This year, our plum tree has outdone itself. Every branch seems to carry more than it can comfortably hold, its deep purple fruit glowing softly between the leaves.

Out here on the Frisian countryside, the rhythm of the seasons is impossible to ignore. The vegetable garden asks to be picked almost daily, herbs are dried on the kitchen table, beans are blanched for the freezer, tomatoes slowly become sauce, and baskets of fruit wait patiently for their turn. It is joyful work, but also meaningful work. Growing food teaches gratitude, while preserving it teaches patience.

I have always felt that harvesting is only half the story. The real pleasure lies in carrying a little of summer forward into the colder months.

Because autumn will arrive, as it always does. I know that when I say this, people sometimes look at me with a slightly amused expression, but I can already hear it in the geese. Their voices have changed. There is an autumn sound in their calls now. And every so often, a formation passes overhead in a perfect V, almost completely silent — so different from the passionate chatter that filled the skies only a short while ago. The mornings will become misty, the days will shorten, and eventually winter will settle over the fields.

On those quiet afternoons, how wonderful it will be to open a jar of homemade plum compote and spoon it over warm oat pancakes. Or to serve a gently spiced plum chutney alongside a fragrant Indian biryani. Perhaps a bottle of homemade plum juice will brighten a grey January morning, reminding us that sunlight once filled these very fruits.

Rather than making only jam, I’ve decided to divide this year’s harvest in several different ways, allowing every plum to find its own purpose. Some will become juice, others compote, some will be dried, frozen, turned into chutney or fruit leather. Every bottle, every jar and every freezer bag is, in its own way, a small promise to my future self [10 easy plum recipes under illustration]

10 Ways to Preserve a Bountiful Plum Harvest

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Every photograph published here begins with a real encounter, a real place and a camera. I use no generative AI to create or alter my photographic work beyond standard photographic processing. Should I ever publish AI-generated imagery, it will be clearly identified.

I believe in being transparent about how my work is made.

In my writing, AI serves as a careful language assistant—helping with translation, idiom or clarity. It does not replace my voice, my memories or my observations.

In fact, I very often carry a notebook and an old-fashioned fountain pen with me. I don’t dictate my ideas into my iPhone—although I know how useful that can be. I would rather find a quiet spot somewhere in the forests of the Morvan, or sit by the water in Friesland, and sketch, write and simply let my mind wander for a while. That’s usually when things start to flow.

The old-school way ;-)

Every word published here is ultimately my own responsibility.

No piece from me last Sunday — and, if I am honest, not a word about this in months. So this one runs long: there is something I have needed to get off my chest. A photographer answers back at last, on copyright, consent, and the woman the internet forgot to name.

Somewhere in the noise of the past months, a photograph I made on a winter afternoon in 2010 became one of the most-shared images in India. You have probably seen it: a young woman with pale amber eyes the internet decided to call “tigress eyes.” Millions of people have now looked into those eyes. None of them were told who was holding the camera — and almost everything they were told about the picture is wrong.

I am a photographer. For months I have stayed quiet while the story travelled — through Instagram reels and Reddit threads, into Indian national newspapers, across languages I cannot read. I stayed quiet because I simply did not know how to defend myself against the dozens — what am I saying, the hundreds — of strangers who had already written the part for me: the foreigner who “took” something from a poor Indian woman and grew rich on it. But silence is its own kind of caption. So I am writing this — once, and plainly — to answer the commotion, the insinuations, and the flat-out lies.

What is actually true

On 22 January 2010, at a quarter to five in the afternoon, I made this photograph in the desert just outside Pushkar, in the low gold light of a Rajasthan winter.

It was not a chance encounter. We had hired a camel cart for the day — the whole family and I — and spent the afternoon rattling out across the scrub, the children packed in under the canopy, everyone talking at once. We climbed trees. My camera was with me, as it always was and as everyone had long since grown used to, and from high in the branches they would call down to me: “Mira, take picture!” — Mira, photu khencho! Mira is what they call me. We were simply people having a good afternoon together.

When the light went, we went back and cooked. A fire in the corner of the courtyard, cauliflower and peas chopped on the kitchen floor, puris coming out of the oil in batches, and all of us eating on the ground as it got dark — the Indian vegetarian kitchen, which is, and I say this without hesitation, my favourite food in the world.

That is the afternoon this photograph came from. So: it was not at the Pushkar Camel Fair. It was not twenty years ago. It was not a stranger’s spontaneous click at a fairground stall. Those three details, repeated in headline after headline, are simply untrue — and they are where the invention begins.

The woman is Pappu Devi, of Pushkar. She agreed to be photographed, and there is a signed model release. Today she runs her own stall selling handmade Banjara-style bags and souvenirs; she is married, a mother of three daughters, two of whom have inherited her rare light eyes. All of that is true, and lovely, and I am glad the world is enchanted by her. What I cannot let stand are the two claims that turn a portrait into an accusation.

The postcard that never was

Article after article states that this photograph “found its way onto postcards, souvenirs and memorabilia sold across Rajasthan and beyond.” That is not true. To my knowledge this image was never made into a postcard at all; and if such a postcard exists anywhere, it was produced without my permission.

What is true is almost the exact opposite of the insinuation. I made postcards of my own photographs and carried them to Pushkar in stacks, by hand, year after year. Almost everyone in the family had a card of their own — their own face, their own portrait — and they sold them to tourists at the stall and kept everything they earned. When a stack ran out, I brought a new one on my next visit. And of the photographs I loved most I had large prints made, and those I delivered by hand as well.

So yes — there were postcards in Pushkar. I made them, I paid for them, I carried them there, and the family sold them for their own profit. They were a small livelihood I was glad to help build, not a business I ran.

The photographer who “got rich”

And then the accusation at the centre of everything: that I grew rich on her face. Here is the plain truth, and I will put it on the record. Over the years I have given Pappu and her family far more than I ever earned from this photograph. I have paid the family’s hospital and medical bills more than once. I paid for a new roof on their house. I have sent money for their living costs many times, by Western Union, whenever it was needed — and I could go on. I do not say this to be thanked, or to cast myself as a benefactor. I say it because the single most repeated claim about me is not merely unproven: it is the exact reverse of what happened.

How a photograph disappears into “content”

When the picture went viral, it did not travel under my name. It travelled under none. Accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers reposted the same frame with captions like “a traveling photographer,” “a stranger at the fair,” or simply “photographer unknown.” One widely-syndicated site went further and credited the picture to the French photographer Réhahn — a fine photographer who works mostly in Vietnam, and who did not take this photograph — complete with a tender, invented story about him “returning to find her.” That his name attached itself so easily tells you exactly how little the actual author matters once an image slips its moorings.

This is worth naming plainly, because it is the mechanism of the whole affair: an uncredited photograph is not an anonymous one. Someone made it. Removing the name does not free the picture; it hides a person. Multiply that by a few hundred million views and you have a strange modern haunting — a face everyone knows, attached to a maker no one will name, wrapped in a biography no one bothered to check.

Where the story came from — a record

Because so much of this rests on assumption rather than fact, I want to leave an actual record — a sample of where the claims appeared, what each one asserts, and how far it reached. It is not exhaustive; the picture has been reposted more times than anyone could count. But it is verifiable: every entry below can be found and read. The false threads are consistent — the wrong place (the Camel Fair), the wrong date (“twenty years ago”), the missing or invented author, and the phantom postcard trade.

The accusation — and what it gets right before it gets wrong

The suspicion underneath the comments is that a photographer like me exploited this woman — profited from her face while she stayed poor and nameless. I want to take that seriously rather than wave it away, because beneath the cruelty there is a real history worth respecting.

For more than a century, powerful outsiders have photographed vulnerable people and profited while the subjects stayed nameless and unpaid — colonial “ethnographic” portraits, the postcard trade in other people’s faces, the long habit of treating the poor of the world as scenery. That history is real, and ugly. When someone sees a Western photographer’s portrait of a poor Indian woman circulating for attention, they are pattern-matching to something that has genuinely happened, again and again. The instinct is not stupid. It deserves an answer, not a sneer.

But suspicion is not evidence, and a stereotype is not a biography. The honest response to a real history is not to re-enact its accusations against the nearest available face — it is to look at what actually occurred.

And what actually occurred is on the record above and below: there was consent and a model release; the picture was not taken by trick; there was no postcard empire; and the person who has most directly gained from this image over sixteen years is Pappu Devi herself, at her own stall, on her own terms — helped, quietly, by me. If that is exploitation, it is a very strange kind.

What copyright actually is

Much of the online argument runs on a folk theory of copyright that has almost nothing to do with the law. So, plainly — and with the caveat that I am a photographer, not a lawyer:

Copyright in a photograph exists automatically the moment the shutter falls. No registration, no symbol, no ceremony. Under the law of my own country, the Netherlands (the Auteurswet), and across the European Union, the photographer is the author and first owner of that copyright. India — where this picture lives its second life — works the same way under the Copyright Act of 1957: the photographer is the author. Protection lasts a very long time: the author’s life plus seventy years in Europe, plus sixty in India.

Alongside that sits something people forget entirely: moral rights. Separate from the commercial copyright, the author holds the right to be named as the maker of the work (attribution) and the right to object to its distortion (integrity). India protects these explicitly in Section 57; they are strong across the Netherlands and Europe. Stripping my name from the photograph touches the first right. Running it through an AI filter and passing the result off as the same picture touches the second. Reposting a photograph without credit is not “sharing.” In the plain legal sense, it is infringement.

You wont believe this: YouTube video

It becomes worse....

What “fair use” is — and what it is not

“Fair use” has become the magic phrase people type to mean “I found it online, so it’s mine to use.” That is not what it means. Fair use (in the United States) and its cousin fair dealing (in India, under Section 52, and the quotation right in the Netherlands) are narrow, carefully bounded exceptions — criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, research — and even then they weigh how much is taken, for what purpose, and what effect it has on the value of the original. Genuine journalism may reproduce an image to report on it; it is still expected to credit the maker.

What fair use does not cover is the bulk of what happened to my photograph: a meme account reposting it purely to harvest likes and followers, a content farm wrapping it in advertising to earn ad money, a business using that striking face to sell a product. None of those are commentary on the image. They are simply uses of it — and uses need permission. The word “fair” is doing a great deal of dishonest work in a lot of captions.

The model’s rights, and mine

If copyright answers “who owns the photograph,” it does not answer “what do we owe the person in it.” Those are different questions, and both deserve a clear answer.

A model release is a contract of consent — the sitter’s permission for her likeness to be used. But it does two things people constantly confuse. It grants permission to use a likeness; it does not transfer the copyright to the sitter. Signing a release does not make the photograph “hers” any more than agreeing to be interviewed makes you the author of the article. She consented to the use of her image; I remain the author of the photograph. Both are simultaneously, unremarkably true.

And consent is not the end of the moral relationship — it is the beginning of one. The sitter keeps her dignity and a real stake in how her face moves through the world. To me that has always meant credit where the picture goes, honesty about what it is, fairness where it earns — and, in this case, showing up: the postcards carried by hand, the support given over years. The shutter closing is not the moment responsibility ends. It is the moment it starts.

Why it is always the photographer who is attacked

Here is the question underneath the whole storm, and the one I most want to answer honestly: why does a tender portrait of a beautiful woman so reliably curdle into an attack on the person who made it?

Part of it is the arithmetic of virality. When a face like this travels, its beauty is consumed by everyone — freely, instantly, endlessly. But beauty at that scale also provokes discomfort: about looking, about desire, about inequality, about who gets to be seen and who gets to do the seeing. That discomfort needs somewhere to land — and it almost never lands where it belongs.

It does not land on the millions who looked. It does not land on the outlets — a few serious, most not — that published my photograph without a licence, without credit, and without a single attempt to find out who had made it. On the contrary: several of them were congratulated for “exposing” the injustice done to her. They committed the infringement and collected the applause for denouncing it, all without doing one minute of fact-checking. The world upside down.

So the unease travels past all of them and settles on the only person anyone can picture: the one who “took” the photograph. The photographer becomes the lightning rod for a whole crowd’s discomfort.

Notice even the verb. We say a photographer takes a picture — as if something were removed from the sitter rather than made with her. The language pre-loads the accusation. And notice the assumption sitting underneath it: that a beautiful woman is, of course, photographed by a man — and that the man is, of course, profiting. Read the comments and it is everywhere. “Find that photographer and question him about the royalty.” “He never thought of sharing that fame with her.” “Wicked photographer.” Not one of those strangers knew my name. Every single one of them was certain I was a man.

The gendered edge runs deeper than pronouns. A portrait of a beautiful woman is assumed, almost by reflex, to be an act of extraction rather than collaboration. The more intimate and human the portrait — the more it feels like a real meeting between two people — the more it can read, to a stranger scrolling past, as evidence of power misused. Tenderness gets mistaken for trespass.

The paradox is exact: the very quality that makes a portrait worth defending — the sense of a real person truly seen — is the quality that invites the suspicion that she was taken advantage of.

The answer is not to stop photographing beautiful people, or to flinch at making pictures that move strangers. It is to be able to say, plainly and without shame: I asked, she agreed, I have never hidden my name, I invented no fairground legend, and I have given back more than I took.

The Afghan Girl in the room

None of this is new, and it helps to say so. In 1985, Steve McCurry’s portrait of a green-eyed Afghan refugee became one of the most famous photographs ever published. For seventeen years the world knew her only as “the Afghan Girl.” The image made a magazine and a photographer world-famous; the woman in it, Sharbat Gula, remained anonymous and poor — and, for a long time, unaware of her own fame. Uncannily, the same search engines that misplace my name now file my photograph in the same bin as hers, one green-eyed woman beside another.

I raise it because it is the template — and because it complicates the easy story in a way worth sitting with. When National Geographic found Sharbat Gula again in 2002, they did not simply take another picture and leave. They paid for medical care for her family and for a pilgrimage to Mecca; they set up the Afghan Girls Fund (later broadened, in 2008, into the Afghan Children’s Fund) to educate Afghan girls; and in 2021, when the Taliban’s return put her in danger, she was evacuated to Italy with that government’s help, after years of appeals. Whatever one thinks of the original photograph, a great deal was done, over decades, to give something back to the woman and her community.

And yet — this is the part that matters most — even all of that did not settle the argument. Gula has said she was angered that the picture was taken and published without her consent; critics still call the image “poverty porn”; scholars still teach it as a case study in the ethics of photographing the vulnerable. Which tells me something clarifying and a little humbling: no amount of giving back buys silence, and it was never supposed to. The point of credit, consent and care is not to win the argument. It is to be able to stand inside it honestly. If the most generous restitution in the history of photography did not end the debate around the Afghan Girl, I have no illusion that this essay will end the one around mine.

What I actually believe

So let me say clearly what I stand for, since the internet has been happy to guess. Consent first — always asked, never assumed. Credit always — the maker’s name should travel with the work, and so, where she wishes it, should the sitter’s story. Fairness where an image earns. And a relationship of respect with the person who trusted me with her face, one that does not evaporate the moment the picture becomes useful to strangers.

I photographed Pappu Devi because her gaze stopped me — the same gaze that has now stopped the world. I asked, and she agreed. I have never taken my name off this work; other people took it off for me. If we are going to argue about the ethics of pictures — and we should — let us argue about the real thing. Not whether a beautiful woman may be photographed, but whether we can build a culture that passes images around without erasing the people, both subject and author, who brought them into being.

Coda

Pappu Devi still sits at her stall in Pushkar, selling to travellers who recognise her eyes — some of them from postcards I carried to her myself. That, to me, is the true shape of this story: the woman in the photograph, present and dignified, on her own terms. All I am asking is a small and connected thing. When you pass her eyes along — and you will — let both of us keep our names, and let the facts travel with the face.

I know, writing this, that it too will stir up dust. A photographer who defends her own work, who says out loud that she gave more than she got, who insists on being named — that annoys people. So be it. I would rather be argued with honestly than erased politely.

POSTSCRIPT
There is something I have to add, because it is the truest thing I know about this story.

Last December, Pappu Devi lost her daughter Lila. She’s in the tree and on the camel cart above.

The circumstances of Lila’s death are now the subject of a case that will be heard in Jodhpur. Because nothing has yet been ruled on, I will not set out here what the family believes happened, and I will name no one. What I can say is that Pappu found messages on her daughter’s phone — Lila asking to come home, asking to be allowed to leave — and that what she has uncovered since points in a direction that is, in India, devastatingly familiar: a young woman’s life ending far too early, in circumstances bound up with dowry and control, with no one held to account.

Pappu decided she would not accept that.

She has spent months going from police station to police station, gathering evidence, carrying her own case through a legal system that was never built for people without money or connections. She has done it while grieving — and not for the first time. She has buried children before.

I have offered to pay the legal costs, and I intend to see that through. I am not writing this to be admired for it. I am writing it because this year the internet argued at great length about whether a photographer had grown rich from Pappu Devi’s face, while Pappu Devi was walking from one police station to the next trying to get someone to answer for her daughter’s death.

Millions of people have looked into her eyes. Almost none of them thought to ask how she was.

That is the distance between an image and a life.

If you want to help, wait for me — I will share a way to do that once I am certain it is in the right hands.

The temperature had already climbed well above thirty degrees when I started looking for something refreshing to drink.

According to the French weather service, tomorrow could become ‘the hottest day ever recorded in France, regardless of the month.’ Whether that record will actually be broken remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: staying hydrated has become essential.

Most days at the moment are spent outdoors. I am clearing hay from the fields, filling and emptying wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow beneath the hot summer sun. Hours pass surprisingly quickly, and I often realise far too late that I haven’t been drinking enough water.

That is exactly why I started making these garden drinks. A large glass jug placed in the shade nearby becomes a gentle reminder to pause for a moment. Somehow it is much easier to reach for a glass when the water is infused with flowers, fruit and herbs gathered from around the garden.

When this house first came into our possession, the cellars were filled with preserving jars. Shelves upon shelves of them. At the time, I had no idea how useful they would become. These days they are perfect for storing chilled drinks overnight. Before going to bed, I fill a few jars and pitchers and leave them cooling in the cellar, ready for the next hot day.

Not a soft drink from a bottle. Not a Crémant de Bourgogne. Just something simple made from whatever is growing nearby.

One of the things I love about spending time in rural France is that inspiration is often found within a few steps of the kitchen door. A handful of lavender, a rose in bloom, a sprig of mint, a lime left in the fruit bowl. Nothing special on its own, but together they can become something surprisingly refreshing.

This week I started experimenting with garden drinks. The first was a deep ruby-red infusion of hibiscus, rose petals, mint and lime. The colour alone was enough to make me smile. That led to more experiments, including a few with lavender from the garden.

The recipes below are simple, easy to adapt, and perfect for a warm summer afternoon in the countryside.

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I have five metres of wall in Amsterdam this September. Five metres does not sound like much until you try to fill it well. Then it is either far too little or far too much, depending on the hour and the strength of the coffee.

So I did what I always do before I trust a real wall: I built a fake one. In Photoshop, to scale. I set a horizon at eye height, I thought about how far back a visitor would stand, and I tried to give the portraits and the landscapes a rhythm — a tall image to slow you down, a wide one to let you breathe, and back again. I moved frames by a centimetre and felt it in my whole body. I was pleased.

And then, somewhere underneath the pleasure, a small voice. Is it a little too much?

I ignored it for a day or two.

Lesson one: ask

Here is the thing I keep relearning. My eye is not neutral about my own work. It is loyal. It loves the difficult images most of all.

So I showed my wall to two people whose eyes I trust: Denise Woerdman, Creative Director of the Kiekie Academy, and Roy Kahmann, Director of the Hungry Eye Group. I did not coordinate this. I simply lost my nerve and asked.

Both understood exactly where I wanted to go. And both, entirely independently of each other, used the same word.

Too busy.

That is not the answer you hope for. It is the answer you can work with. When two people arrive separately at the same verdict, that is not an opinion. That is a reading. They are both looking with me now, and they are both pointing at the same old principle.

Less is more.

I have heard it a thousand times. I had never really asked it a single question. So, before I start killing anything, I want to know: where does this come from, and why should it be true?

Where the phrase actually comes from

We tend to credit the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who turned less is more into the battle cry of modern design — glass, steel, nothing you don’t need.

But he didn’t invent it. The line is older, and it comes from a far more interesting place. It first appears in 1855, in a poem by Robert Browning called Andrea del Sarto — written in the voice of a real Renaissance painter, the one Vasari nicknamed ‘the faultless painter.’ Browning’s Andrea is technically perfect and quietly heartbroken, because perfection turned out not to be enough. He never reached the wild heights of Raphael or Michelangelo. And it is he, the safe one, who murmurs the words: Well, less is more, Lucrezia.

I find that delicious. The phrase that became minimalism’s law was born inside a poem about an artist whose restraint may have been his ceiling.

Which is exactly why I don’t want to treat it as a law. Less is more is not a commandment. It is a question about what you want the work to do.

Why it works on a wall

When I’m honest, the case for restraint is not mysterious.

A wall with fewer images gives each one somewhere to stand. The empty space stops being ‘empty’ and starts doing work — it becomes the silence that lets a photograph be heard. And something else happens, something I only ever see once I’ve cut: the images that survive begin to talk to one another. Crowd the wall and they shout over each other. Thin it out and they start a conversation.

An edited wall is not a smaller wall. It is a wall that has decided what it is about.

That is the part my loyal eye keeps missing. I am protecting individual photographs. The visitor is not looking at individual photographs. The visitor is looking at the wall.

In fairness to the opposite

I should say the other side has a case too, because it does.

In 1966 the architect Robert Venturi answered Mies with a perfect three-word grenade: Less is a bore. He had a point. Think of the great nineteenth-century salon hangs — paintings stacked frame to frame, floor to ceiling, the whole room a wall of abundance. There the density is the experience. Maximalism can be a deliberate, glorious choice.

The key word is deliberate. Abundance as a decision is one thing. Abundance because you couldn’t bear to choose is another, and only one of those reads as confidence from across a room.

My wall is a meeting place. This September, South Korea and East Africa will sit on the same five metres — the cloth of one culture beside the cloth of another, colour answering colour, pattern answering pattern. If I overload it, the two worlds compete. If I hold back, they get to converse. For this wall, restraint isn’t a style. It’s the only way the introduction works.

Why killing darlings is so hard

‘Murder your darlings’ is usually pinned on Faulkner, who never said it. It belongs to a writing teacher named Arthur Quiller-Couch, who told his students in 1914 to be ruthless with their most beloved sentences.

He understood the trap. The darling is almost never the weakest image. It is the one that cost me the most to make, or the one carrying a memory that only I can see. I stand in front of it and feel the heat of the day it was taken. The wall feels nothing. The visitor feels nothing. The wall does not know my memories — it only knows what it shows.

That is the quiet cruelty of editing. The photograph I most want to keep and the photograph the wall most needs are, more often than I’d like, not the same photograph.

Why I let other people in

There’s an old line about not being able to read the label from inside the jar. That is me, every time, with my own work. I am too close to see the front of it.

This is why outside eyes are not a failure of nerve but a tool. Denise and Roy aren’t carrying my attachments, so they can see the wall the way a stranger in Amsterdam will see it — for the first time, and only once. Their two independent verdicts weren’t an insult to my taste. They were the most useful gift I could have asked for.

The road continues

So now comes the hard, good part. I will say goodbye to images I had genuinely looked forward to showing. Some of my favourites will not make the wall, and that is not a tragedy — it’s the whole job.

This entire run-up to Hungry Eye has turned into a kind of education I didn’t sign up for and wouldn’t trade. Build the wall. Doubt the wall. Ask. Listen. Cut. Watch what’s left finally start to speak.

Five metres. Two worlds. Fewer pictures than I wanted, and — I’m beginning to believe — a stronger wall because of it.

And since I’m now trying to practise less is more in my writing too, I really shouldn’t tell you what the days look like up here on my French mountain.

So I won’t mention that yesterday, at thirty-one degrees Celcius, I stripped a whole wall bare of rampant ivy. I won’t bring up the roses closing in around me like a soft green fence, as if to say don’t go — stay. And I certainly can’t tell you about the small express train that crossed my path this morning: one mother wild boar and nine piglets behind her, in single file — not one of which I could have brought myself to leave out.

None of that belongs in a piece about restraint. So you’ll have to picture it yourselves.

Come and see the wall in September. I’ll have spent the summer learning what to leave out — and, clearly, still getting it wrong in all the best ways.

It has been quiet here. No new posts, no updates, no carefully chosen words landing in your inbox. If you noticed, thank you. If you didn’t — well, that’s fair too. Substack waits patiently while life refuses to.

But quiet here on Substack has never meant quiet out there. A lot has been happening — and over the coming months, I want to share it properly.

The next period will revolve around two things: culture and nature. Not as a philosophy, just as the reality of my life right now. On one side, I am preparing for an exhibition at Hungry Eye Fair in Amsterdam this September — one of the most prestigious photography fairs in the Netherlands. On the other, we are deep into plans for our six hectares of Frisian land, which we want to transform into something genuinely alive with biodiversity.

Both are big. Both are new territory in their own way. And both come with questions I don’t yet have all the answers to.

For my paid subscribers, I want to go into real detail. What does it actually take to prepare for a serious photography exhibition? What do you invest — financially and otherwise? How do you make your selection, and how do you price your work? What goes into designing five metres of wall in a museum-quality setting? And on the nature side: what can you actually do with a Frisian meadow? What does biodiversity mean in practice — in terms of planting, soil life, insects, reptiles, herbs, and animals? What rules apply, and what is genuinely possible?

My work (and life) is varied, but I hope it’s always worth your time. And there is one thing I will say: I fully intend to bring my camera to the land. To document what happens there — season by season, intervention by intervention. Because somewhere in the back of my mind — or perhaps not so far back anymore — is the idea that this is where it all comes together. Nature and culture, not as two separate projects running in parallel, but meeting each other, strengthening each other.

That is what excites me most right now.

Hungry Eye — and the moment the doubt walked in

Hungry Eye Fair is one of the most distinctive photography events in the Netherlands — a boutique fair with the atmosphere and ambition of a museum, held this September in Amsterdam’s Kromhouthal. What sets it apart from a conventional art fair is simple: there are no booths. Instead, photographers are given wall space in a carefully curated, immersive setting where the work is allowed to breathe and be seen properly. The audience is a mix of serious collectors, gallerists, curators, and people who simply love photography deeply. Alongside the exhibitions runs a full programme of talks, portfolio reviews, and a curated photography book market. It is, in every sense, a serious stage.

And the curators selected my work.

I was genuinely surprised. Pleased, of course — but surprised in that particular way that takes a day or two to settle. Because it did not stay pleasant for long before something else came to sit beside it.

Doubt.

Being selected is not the same as showing up. Showing up at Hungry Eye means committing. It means renting five metres of wall. It means professional-grade prints, museum-quality framing, promotional materials, a carefully considered plan for how your work fills that space. It means a real investment — financial, creative, and emotional. And with that comes the full, familiar chorus: Is my work actually good enough for this? Have I chosen the right images? Wouldn’t a smaller, more local gallery suit me much better right now? Should I really be spending this kind of money?

You barely finish reading the good news before the second-guessing begins.

But here is what happened: I sat with it, and then I made a decision. I said yes. I paid for the wall. And now I have several months ahead of me to prepare — and I am going to take you with me. The selection process, the printing choices, the framing, the wall design. The logistics. The nerves. Almost certainly the nerves quite a lot.

This is the first chapter. There are several more to come.

But for now: Amsterdam. September. Five metres of wall.

Let’s see what we can do with that.

One more thing — France

When I need to get my head straight, I go to France. As you know by now, we have a place in the Morvan — a deeply rural, almost fairytale corner of Burgundy — and it is where I go when I need silence. Real silence. The kind that lets you think properly, work properly, and remember what matters.

It is not entirely without its demands. Quite the opposite. Things grow fast there, and enthusiastically, and largely without asking permission. There will be wheelbarrows. Many wheelbarrows. A hundred or more, if I’m honest with myself about the state of the meadow.

And in between the physical work, I will be doing what I actually do for a living — because no, I don’t yet have the luxury of spending all my time on exhibitions and biodiversity plans. Clients still need me, deadlines still come, and the Morvan happens to be a wonderful place to concentrate. The nightingales and golden orioles and crickets are not quiet, exactly, but they are the right kind of noise.

There is a good chance my next post will come from there. From somewhere under those trees, with grass-stained boots and a full inbox and a camera I’m itching to use.

Six hectares of Frisian meadow. Six hectares of French forest. It is a lot. I know it is a lot. But I feel genuinely, deeply fortunate — and my goal, slowly and without forcing it, is to bring these worlds together. My head is already moving faster than I can keep up with.

But sitting still was never really an option anyway.

This is where it started. From here on I'll take you through the run-up to Hungry Eye, one post at a time — the choosing, the doubting, the killing of darlings. Part One is here →

A package without a sender

Some books are gifts before you even open them.

This one came in the post, with no name on it, no card, no return address. But I knew immediately who was responsible. There were only two people I had told about the leverets behind the tin planter on Easter morning — dear friends who hadn’t read the piece (it wasn’t written yet), but who had witnessed the whole anxious story over the phone. The night camera. The small, furious hope that a hare was doing her five quiet minutes of mothering just out of frame. They were the only ones who could possibly have sent this. And to my surprise, Een haas in huis — the Dutch translation of Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare — turned up on the doormat, beautifully and quietly, as if a hare had brought it itself.

The object itself

The book is beautiful before you read a single word. Not in the loud way books sometimes try to be beautiful. In the quiet way. There are pencil drawings printed along the page edges. There is a ribbon marker — a real one, the kind I refuse to live without — sewn into the spine. There are illustrations throughout, drawn from photographs, soft and exact, the way a memory is exact. Everything about the object suggests someone, somewhere, decided this story deserved to be held with care.

I took it with me to our French mountain. To Le B., our house in the hills where there is no schedule, no notification sound, only birds, crickets and the wind moving through the trees. I read it there, in the green, in the quiet, page by slow page, with the ribbon sliding forward. And I have to tell you, plainly: this is the kindest book I’ve read in a very long time. Possibly ever.

What the book is, and isn’t

The premise is almost embarrassingly simple. During the lockdown, Chloe Dalton — a British political adviser whose previous life involved speeches and strategy and the kind of decisions that move in straight lines — finds a leveret alone in a field near her home. She knows, as I knew that Easter morning behind the planter, that the right thing is almost always to leave a young hare exactly where you found it. The mother visits at dusk for a few minutes. The leveret holds perfectly still. The world is supposed to leave them in peace.

But this leveret is in danger. And so, against her better judgment, Dalton brings it home.

What follows is not a rescue story. It is something much stranger and much quieter than that. It is a long, careful, almost embarrassed coexistence — a person and a wild animal sharing a house without ever quite agreeing to.

The discipline of distance

What makes the book extraordinary is what Dalton refuses to do.

She does not name the hare. She does not try to tame it. She does not — and this is the part that undid me a little — try to make it love her back. The temptation must have been enormous. The hare grows. It comes and goes through an open door. It sleeps on the rug some afternoons and disappears for days at others. It nurses its young in her sitting room and then takes them out into the field. And through all of it, Dalton holds her distance. Not coldly. Tenderly. With the kind of restraint that is, I think, a form of love almost no one teaches us.

Because that - to me - is the real subject of this book. Not the hare. Not the rescue. Distance.

How do you stay close to something wild without ruining it? How do you care for a creature whose entire being depends on not being held? How do you witness without claiming?

What you cannot strategise

Dalton, who comes from a world built on control — political life is nothing if not the management of outcomes — finds herself in a relationship where every familiar instinct is wrong. You cannot strategise a hare. You cannot solve it. You cannot draw it close. The only thing on offer is attention.

And so she pays attention. She writes down what she sees. The way the leveret folds itself into a particular corner. The exact sound of its small paws on the wooden floor. The shift of the seasons through the kitchen window, mapped in the comings and goings of a single, unsentimental animal.

Her prose is plain. Almost severe in places. She refuses adjectives that would do the emotional work for you. And because she refuses, the small moments land with extraordinary weight. A glance. A movement across a room. A pause at the threshold of a door.

A page I read twice

There is a particular sentence in the book — I won’t quote it, partly because I read it in Dutch and partly because it deserves to be found in its own context — about the moment Dalton realises the hare is not hers and never was. I read that page twice. Then I closed the book and sat very still in the grass outside, the way you sit when something has been articulated for you that you didn’t quite know you’d been carrying.

Love, in this book, has nothing to do with holding on. It is in the letting go. In the respecting of distance. In the slow, daily acceptance that something precious is not yours, and never will be, and that this is not a tragedy. It is the whole point.

The darker thread — and why it is not abstract for me

There is a quieter, darker thread running through the book, and I want to name it, because Dalton names it too — never as a lecture, always as a fact she observes from her window.

The hare is in trouble.

Not Dalton’s hare. Hares. The European hare, Lepus europaeus, the same species I sat watching behind a tin planter on Easter morning, is in steep decline across much of its range. And the reasons are almost banal in their cruelty: the relentless tidying of the agricultural landscape, the enormous machines that mow at speeds no leveret can survive, the disappearance of hedgerows — those untidy, irreplaceable corridors of bramble and hawthorn that hares need not as decoration but as home. Pesticides that thin out the wildflowers and the insects and, eventually, everything that depends on them. Field edges trimmed within an inch of their lives. A countryside that looks, from a passing car, like a green and pleasant place — and is, increasingly, a desert wearing green.

A hare cannot live in a tidy world. It needs scruff. It needs margins. It needs the kind of unproductive, slightly overgrown corner that modern farming has been engineered to eliminate.

I want to be very direct here: this is not happening only in the abstract, or only in Chloe Dalton’s English fields. This is happening exactly outside my own door, in Friesland, on the same flat green countryside where the two leverets sat between my planters on Easter morning. The Frisian landscape — once ditches with wild edges, rough pasture, pooling areas for livestock, varied light — is being smoothed and shaved and emptied year by year. The hares are fewer. The meadow birds are fewer. The insects are fewer. You can hear it in the silence.

What we are doing on six hectares

This book did not change my mind. But it did sharpen something I already knew.

We have six hectares here in Friesland, and some time ago we made the decision that we would not manage this land the way the surrounding fields are managed. We had already seen the loss with our own eyes. Raising Hare simply made it impossible to look away.

So this is what we are doing, and what we plan to do.

We have now planted 250 shrubs — hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, dogwood, spindle, guelder rose — to grow into a long, mixed, deliberately untidy hedgerow. Not a clipped green wall. A hedge in the old sense: layered, scruffy, full of thorns and berries, the kind of structure a leveret can hide inside and a yellowhammer can nest in and a hedgehog can travel along after dark.

We mow significantly less, and where we mow we mow late, and we mow in stages, so that there is always somewhere for a young animal to go. The patches we leave become, within a single season, full of yarrow and knapweed and self-heal and clover and a dozen things I am still learning the names of.

We let wildflowers and herbs come up where they want to come up. Some of what other people would call weeds we now call guests.

And we are in active conversation with the provincie about further plans — wetter corners, more native planting, ecological corridors that connect to neighbouring land — because six hectares is small, but six hectares connected to the next six is suddenly something a hare can actually live on.

We didn’t need a book to tell us this was the right direction. But Raising Hare underlined it. It made the urgency feel personal in a way statistics never quite manage. Every page reminded me: if there is no scruff, there is no hare. It really is that simple, and that hard.

Why the honesty matters

What I love most — and I do love this book, with the kind of helpless, slightly surprised love you feel when something you didn’t ask for turns out to be exactly what you needed — is that Dalton never pretends she has done a model thing. She knows what she did was unusual. She knows it would, in most circumstances, be the wrong choice. She does not recommend it. She does not romanticise it. She simply tells the truth of what happened, and what it asked of her, and what it gave back.

That honesty is what keeps the book from sentimentality. And it is, I think, what will make it last.

A book to return to

So here I am. Easter long behind me, on our French mountain still and a copy of Raising Hare on the table, ribbon tucked between two pages I keep returning to.

I think I will be returning to it for a long time.

I cannot recommend this book more warmly. Read it slowly. Hold the object. Let the small drawings run along the edge of the page.

And then, perhaps, look out of the window for a while. See what is there. See what isn’t. And ask yourself what hedge you might let grow.

Would you like a hare in your house?

This week’s Print of the Week is one of my hare photographs, and only four prints are available at a special price — only this week (ending Sunday May 10th, midnight), only for the first four readers who reach out.

It's the closest I can offer to what Raising Hare gave me: the wild thing, held at the right distance. A brief moment in the field. In frame, forever.

Take me to the print release

Every Sunday I offer one (or two) prints, available for €100 per print. Orders are handled on a first-come, first-served basis. This weekly offer is valid until the following Sunday at midnight.

This week there is one image — and for that reason, four prints are available. Not more for this price!

The photograph is titled The Right Distance.

Specifications
• Size: 30 × 45 cm, including white border
• Open edition: not limited, not signed
• Printed on Epson satin/matte paper
• Shipping within the Netherlands is included
• For international shipping, please send me a message
• Paid subscribers receive a 15% discount on this weekly offer

Read the story behind this photo

For the uninitiated: a Vide Grenier — literally ‘empty the attic’ — is that gloriously French village ritual in which everyone drags their old furniture, dusty porcelain, mismatched cutlery, mysterious copper objects, fishing tackle from 1972, and grand-mère’s napperons en dentelle out onto trestle tables. It is a flea market, yes, but to call it a flea market is to call a bœuf bourguignon ‘a stew.’ A Vide Grenier is a social event. People bring their dogs. There is un petit blanc by 9:30. The brocanteurs nod to one another gravely. Children negotiate solemnly over Tintin albums. And occasionally — just occasionally — you find something that quietly stops you in your tracks.

This morning, that something was a painting.

An old man in a flat cap had just hauled it out of the back of an old Renault van — the kind of van that has been parked in a Burgundian barn since François Mitterrand was president — and he had absolutely no idea what to ask for it. ‘C’est ma femme qui s’occupe des prix, Madame, mais elle est partie acheter des plants…’ His wife was apparently a few stalls down, deep in negotiation over tomates cerises jaunes. ‘Elles donnent beaucoup, Madame, tout l’été!’ — and reader, I succumbed too, later that morning. Who in their right mind would refuse the prospect of a tarte fine aux tomates cerises jaunes in August? I also picked up a few courgettes de Nice: the perfectly round little ones, made for petits farcis niçois. The plants are coming with me to Friesland. The recipes will follow.

But we were talking about art.

A price was eventually agreed: €10. I bought it on the spot — something about it had reached out and taken hold of me. The blue. The downcast eyes. The strange, melancholic stillness of the girl, her fingers resting on a small, limp white bird.

Tirage tardif

At home, with a coffee and a stronger Wi-Fi signal, the truth came out: I had apparently just acquired a Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Jeune fille qui pleure son oiseau mort — A Young Girl Weeping for Her Dead Bird, also known in English as Girl with a Dead Canary. Until very recently it was hanging in the Louvre. Sadly the security there has not been quite what it used to be. Je plaisante, bien sûr. (Mostly.)

In truth, several versions of this composition exist. The most celebrated is the 1765 canvas at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh — the one Denis Diderot wrote about in his Salon review with the breathless tenderness usually reserved for love letters. ‘Le joli élégie!’ he sighed; he then proceeded to address the painted girl directly for several pages, like a man who had quite forgotten he was reviewing an exhibition. An earlier version from 1759 hangs — yes — in the Louvre.

Greuze (1725–1805) was the great sentimental moralist of eighteenth-century French painting. He made his name with tender narrative scènes de genre — broken pitchers, tearful village girls, virtuous fathers, prodigal sons — and Diderot adored him for it. The dead bird, of course, was never just a dead bird. In the polite code of the Ancien Régime it spoke of lost innocence: the empty cage on the table, the slipping shoulder of the chemise, the limp little body beneath a girl’s fingertips — a small, exquisite scandal hidden inside something that looked like a sigh. Greuze was eventually eclipsed by the cooler line of David and the Neoclassicists, but his eighteenth-century public was enormous, and these Greuze ‘girls’ were copied, engraved, and reproduced well into the twentieth century. Let us say, charitably, that my version is what an art historian might call a tirage tardif — a later impression — paper softly flaking at the corners, the colours just slightly off in the way that only time can manage. But it has the right melancholy, the right blue, the right ever-so-slightly heartbroken tilt of the head. For €10 and a chat with a man in a flat cap, je suis ravie.

These are the Sundays I treasure. The ones in which I drift, without the slightest effort, from Greuze to courgette de Nice, from a girl mourning her canary to a brocanteur‘s wife haggling over tomato seedlings, and then wind my way home through landscapes so absurdly beautiful that you half expect a druid to step out from behind an oak.

The painting is now leaning against the wall. The plants are on the windowsill. The tarte is still theoretical.

But the day — quelle journée — was entirely real.

Here's the thing — stories like this one take time. Time getting up at six because the mist climbing out of a Burgundian valley does not wait for anyone. Time standing very still in front of a stranger's painting on a trestle table, wondering why it feels like the most important thing you've seen all week. Time sitting with drawers full of photographs from sleeping villages and chapelles oubliées, asking yourself what they want to become. Not everything I write will be free — but for roughly the price of one very good café a month, you get all of it. The Vide Greniers and the chapelles romanes. The €10 Greuzes and the women haggling over tomates cerises jaunes.

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The grass, you see, does not wait. Every spring it surges with the confidence of something that has never once doubted itself, and if you leave a French hillside unattended for too long, the driveway simply disappears. The wildflowers I encourage — the ox-eye daisies, the scabious, whatever that violet thing is that comes back every year in the lower meadow — those I let tangle and climb. But the approach to the house, and the ground closest to the walls, must be kept navigable. Otherwise, by July, you are no longer arriving anywhere. You are simply pushing through.

So I planned a trip. A practical trip. Drive down from Friesland in the late afternoon, dodge the traffic that always clogs the border crossings around dinnertime, and arrive at my little place on the hill in Burgundy sometime before morning. I have done it before. I am good at it. I had a flask of good coffee, my dog curled on the passenger seat, and four hours of podcasts queued — including a particularly promising conversation between two people I admire enormously on the subject of geopolitics. I was, in short, entirely prepared.

I was smug, even. Quietly, privately smug.

The ‘aire’

The first hint that the evening had other ideas arrived at an aire somewhere in the French northeast. These rest stops are normally simple enough — lorries to the left, cars to the right, everyone minding their own exhausted business. This one had apparently abandoned that arrangement entirely. Trucks were everywhere: in the bays, on the verges, tilted at improbable angles onto the hard shoulder. One had broken down at a position specifically calculated to trap any vehicle foolish enough to attempt entry.

That vehicle was mine.

I will say this for the men who surrounded me in the following half-hour: they were not unkind. One addressed me in what I believe was Romanian with considerable warmth. Another offered reassurances in Polish that sounded genuinely sincere. A third, Italian perhaps, made a gesture suggesting that freedom was imminent — ten minutes, maybe fifteen, and I would be on my way.

Reader, it was not fifteen minutes.

In the deep middle of the night I sat wedged between a broken truck and a running one, listening to a discussion of NATO’s eastern flank while my dog cheerfully sniffed at strangers’ boots.

Hoods were up. Engines idled and revved and fell silent and revved again. Cigarettes were lit, finished, discarded. I drank too much coffee. My dog found the whole situation — the smells, the boots, the Romanian legs particularly — absolutely riveting, and I envied her the ability to be delighted by circumstance rather than undone by it.

When the way finally cleared and I rejoined the motorway, I felt the specific satisfaction of a person who has endured something and come out the other side. It would not happen again. The rest of the journey would be straightforward. I had, in some cosmic sense, paid my toll.

The circle near Metz

It was at Metz that the signs appeared.

Déviation.

The first one I caught in the sweep of my headlights — low to the ground, partially obscured, placed with the confidence of someone who had never driven this road at this hour. I followed it. There was a second sign, and I followed that too. Then there was nothing. A roundabout. Several options. No further instruction from the universe.

I chose. I drove. I chose again.

Forty-five minutes later — perhaps fifty — I saw, with the specific horror of a nightmare made concrete, the lights of the aire. The same aire. The same broken truck, now repaired and gone, but the same lay-by, the same geometry of the place. I had described a perfect circle in the dark.

What I said to my dog at that moment is between me and her. She received it with the diplomatic silence of a creature who loves you unconditionally and knows when not to push.

I drove over a curb. I cut across a patch of grass that was not meant for cutting across. And somehow — I genuinely cannot reconstruct the logic of it — I found the road again, and Nancy, and eventually the motorway south.

3:15 AM

I arrived on my hill in the very deepest part of the night, long after I had planned, my neck rigid, my temper in ruins, the last of my coffee cold in the flask. I turned off the engine. I sat for a moment doing nothing at all.

And then I got out of the car.

The stars were — I want to find a word that is not hyperbole, but there is none — extraordinary. Sharp and numerous and very close, the way they only get when there is no town for miles and the air has a particular cold clarity to it. I stood under them feeling small, which is sometimes exactly what you need.

And then I heard it.

It took me a moment to understand what I was listening to, because I had never, in all my years of arriving at this place, heard anything quite like it. Layered, cascading, impossibly fluent — a sound from the edge of the trees that seemed to be several instruments played by a single mind. It was 3:15 in the morning. It was coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was the most purely beautiful thing I had heard in years.

I stood there in the cold, dog sitting quietly at my feet for once, and I opened my bird identification app with hands that were, I notice now, slightly unsteady.

Nightingales.

They sing most intensely in the darkest hours — competing, overlapping, each one stranger and more extravagant than the last. They do not know it is 3 AM. They do not care that you are tired.

I stood there for longer than was sensible. I was exhausted enough that the beauty of it made me want to cry, which is sometimes how you know a thing is real. Eventually I went inside to find that my neighbours from the village below — sweet people who know I sometimes arrive in the small hours — had turned on the heating for me. The house was warm. I lit a candle and had no need for electric light. I wanted to stay in the Nightingale fairy tale.

I sat down on the bench by the door and thought about the evening. The truck. The Romanian men. The circle I had driven in the dark near Metz. The curb I had mounted. The fifty minutes of going precisely nowhere.

What the détour was worth

Here is the thing about a détour: it only looks like waste while you are in it. From inside the loop — squinting at signs that weren’t there, backtracking through roundabouts, adding an hour to a journey that was already too long — it feels like pure subtraction. Time lost. Energy spent. Patience burned.

But the person who arrives at the right time along the intended road probably goes straight to bed. They do not stand under Burgundian stars at a quarter past three. They do not hear nightingales in full, astonishing voice, performing for no one and everyone at once. They do not receive, at the end of a very long night, the quiet gift of a warm house.

A creative life is full of detours. You know the ones — the projects that circle back to their own beginning, the ideas that deposit you exactly where you started, the long nights of going nowhere that leave you too tired to be guarded. And sometimes, at the end of all that circling, there is something waiting that you would never have found on the direct road.

The next morning I was awake early — earlier than intended, pulled from sleep by the sun coming through the shutters and something else: the unmistakable, ancient sound of a cuckoo. I lay still for a moment just to be sure. Then I got up, greeted my dog, and we walked out into the Morvan forest.

The trees were doing what they do at that hour — holding the light in a particular way, the path ahead opening like a question you are glad to be asked. And I thought: this is where the détour brought me. Not just to a hillside in Burgundy, but to exactly this moment, this morning, this place. The one where, right now, I want to be with my whole heart.

Dilemmas on a Sunday

For eight years, Hans and I worked on The First Ingredient — an international photo project initiated by Johan Pater of Amarant Bakers, celebrating artisan bakers and their unique traditions from across the globe. A labor of love, nearly eight years in the making, the book was created to commemorate the centennial anniversary and Royal status of Amarant Bakers — and what emerged was a limited, private edition of 1,000 numbered copies, gifted to respected associates.

It is, without question, the most beautiful commissioned project I have ever worked on. Fifty countries. Flour-dusted hands and ancient ovens. The smell of fermentation and languages I don’t speak. But beauty, it turns out, comes at a price — and that price was paid in darlings.

So many darlings

Stories that never made it into the book. Not because they weren’t good. Some were too personal. Some too politically sensitive to print. Some wandered too far from bread — into a landscape that stopped me cold, a colour I couldn’t walk past, an interior so perfectly worn by time that I forgot entirely what I had come to photograph. And then there were the lunches. The ones that appeared out of nowhere because someone heard there were strangers in the village and decided that was reason enough to feed them. Those stories, too, stayed behind.

Even with all that cutting, the book weighs five kilos.

And so here I am, on a Sunday, sitting with a question that has no clean answer: what do I do with everything that didn’t fit? Eight years of roads taken, conversations half-translated, light falling exactly exactly right. Do I share it? And if so — how? A series on Substack, perhaps, under something like What the Road Revealed? Or do do I dare to think bigger, quietly and without commitment, about a publication? A second book. Smaller. Personal. Something that exists because the stories simply need somewhere to go.

Dilemmas on a Sunday, people. Dilemmas.

For now, let me take you somewhere. Let me take you to Samarkand.

Few cities carry their history as visibly as Samarkand does. One of the oldest inhabited cities in Central Asia, it sits at the ancient crossroads of the Silk Road — the place where China met Persia, where merchants, scholars, and conquerors all passed through and left something behind. Its skyline is defined by tilework the colour of a winter sky: deep cobalt and turquoise domes that have been catching light for six centuries. The Registan, the city’s great central square, may be the most breathtaking public space in the world that most people have never stood in. Timur — Tamerlane — built his empire here in the 14th century, and the city still carries that ambition in its bones. But Samarkand is not only monuments. It is bread, baked in clay ovens and stamped with wooden seals before dawn. It is the sound of a market waking up. It is the particular gold of the afternoon light on old stone.

It did not all fit into a book about bread.
It fits here. To start with.

That is Samarkand. Or rather — that is a fraction of it, the part that fit into these frames on this particular visit. There are more photographs. There are always more photographs. Fifty countries worth of them, in fact, sitting quietly in hard drives and folders and the particular corner of your memory that only opens when you’re not looking for it.

I keep coming back to the same question, the one I’ve been circling around since the last page of The First Ingredient was printed: what do you do with fifty countries of images that didn’t make the cut — not because they weren’t good enough, but because they told a different story? A more personal one. A book without a brief. Something small and considered and entirely its own thing.

A limited edition, maybe. Fifty countries.
I’m thinking about it. Quietly, for now.
Do I dare?
Should I dare?

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Here is a little Easter story for you — with a heartfelt dilemma at the end.

While most of the civilised world is presently engaged in the highly important activities of eating elaborately decorated eggs, arguing over whether the croissants are still warm, and pretending to enjoy a second mimosa — I find myself sitting on the Frisian countryside with what can only be described as a situation.

It started so innocently. A sunny afternoon before Easter Sunday, spirits high, wheelbarrow full of gloriously rich compost, ready to tend to our vegetable garden. A person at peace with the world. And then — tucked behind a tin planter, half hidden in the shadows — two little puffballs. Stacked. Like the world’s most heartbreakingly adorable pair of socks. Two leverets, tiny as fists, pressed against each other, sharing whatever warmth their miniature bodies could muster.

I stepped back. I breathed. I did not squeal out loud (much).

That evening, a night camera went up. And what followed was both delightful and quietly worrying. The little ones played — genuinely played, tumbling and hopping in the dark with an energy that felt almost reckless for something so small. But their mother? Not a single frame. The whole night through, the camera registered nothing but two leverets doing life entirely on their own.

A word about hares, because they are extraordinary

Here is the thing about European hares (Lepus europaeus): they are, by any conventional parenting standard, absolutely terrible mothers — and yet they have been perfecting this strategy for millions of years.

Unlike rabbits, hares are not burrowers. They give birth in the open — in a scrape of grass, beneath a planter, in the middle of a field — and the young, called leverets, arrive fully furred, eyes open, and ready to experience the full existential weight of being alive. They are what biologists call precocial: born capable. No helpless pink hairless squirming here. From day one, a leveret looks like a hare, just very small and improbably soft.

The mother nurses them for precisely one reason and at precisely one moment: at dusk. She visits her young for only a few minutes each evening — sometimes as little as five — delivers extraordinarily rich, fat-dense milk, and then deliberately leaves. This is not neglect. This is genius. A doe sitting with her young would be a beacon for every fox, crow, and buzzard in the neighbourhood. By staying away almost entirely, she draws no attention to the spot. The leverets themselves are nearly odourless in their first weeks, and they sit perfectly, breathlessly still when danger feels close. The safest thing their mother can do for them is not be there.

Hares can have three or four litters a year, and the leverets from one litter may still be nursing — just barely — while a new pregnancy is already underway. The doe has, in this sense, optimised her entire existence around the continuation of hares as a species. She is not sentimental about it. She is efficient in a way that only millions of years of predation pressure can produce.

Leverets begin eating solid food within days of birth and are largely independent by three to four weeks. They are built for a world that wants to eat them, and they are surprisingly good at surviving it.

The dilemma

And so here I am, Easter morning, looking at my night camera footage with a cup of coffee going cold beside me.

The leverets played. They are alive, they are warm enough together, and their instinct to be still and low is working. The mother’s logic — stay away, draw no predators, visit only briefly — means that a single missed window on a night camera proves very little. She may have come in the short gap between recordings. She may come at dawn, or at a slightly different dusk hour than expected. Hares are not creatures of strict punctuality.

Every instinct says: leave them entirely alone, keep the camera running, and wait one more night. Intervening with healthy wild leverets — however small, however alone they appear — typically does far more harm than good. Wildlife rescue centres will almost always advise that found leverets be left in place unless they are visibly injured, hypothermic, or crying persistently.

But if tomorrow night the camera again shows nothing — if the little ones begin to seem lethargic, cold, or distressed — then the calculus changes, and a call to a local wildlife rescue becomes the right next step.

Easter, after all, carries the stubborn conviction that life tends toward life. That small, fragile, improbable things have a way of making it through the night.

I am choosing to believe that tonight, just after dusk, just out of frame, a hare is doing her five quiet minutes of mothering — and that by tomorrow these two ridiculous puffballs will still be warming each other behind the tin planter, waiting for the world to leave them in peace.

Keep watching. Keep your distance. And maybe — just this once — let the Easter metaphor do its work.

🐾 If you do need to act: the Dutch wildlife helpline 0900-0245 (Dierenambulance) or your regional Stichting Wildopvang can advise on next steps without you needing to handle the animals yourself.

Here's the thing — stories like this one take time. Time wandering a Frisian kitchen garden with a wheelbarrow full of compost, only to freeze completely when two leverets look back at you from behind a tin planter. Time setting up a night camera and lying awake anyway, wondering if their mother came. Time finding words for the particular feeling of standing at the edge of something small and wild and quietly miraculous on Easter morning. From January 2026, not everything I write will be free — but for roughly the price of one very good coffee a month, you get all of it. The leverets, the night cameras, the hares who trust the darkness, and whatever the Frisian countryside decides to throw at us next. Come along properly — it's worth it, I promise.

Isn’t it lonely up there? Isn’t it scary? All that silence — doesn’t it get to you? And the forest, Mirjam, the forest — you just walk into it? Of the beaten track? Alone? With only a dog who, let’s be honest, would sooner befriend a wild boar than fight one?

There’s a particular kind of concern that people reserve for women who choose solitude. It arrives wrapped in genuine care, which makes it both touching and faintly absurd. As if the mountain is waiting for me to let my guard down. As if the trees are up to something.

Here’s what I’ve found, though: the silence isn’t empty. It’s full — of birdsong and wind and the specific creak of an old forest settling into itself. The loneliness people worry about is, from the inside, mostly just space. Room to think. Room to not think. Room to stand still in the middle of nowhere and feel, quietly and without drama, like exactly the right person in exactly the right place.

Is it responsible? Probably debatable. Is the dog a reliable defense against a sanglier with attitude? Absolutely not. Do I go anyway?

Every single day.

And now I’d like to take you with me.
This week: the Morvan in seven days, in pictures and thoughts.

Sunday

There is an hour, just before the light gives up entirely, when the forest stops pretending to be ordinary.

I know this hour well. I go looking for it on purpose.

The lake holds the trees in its arms like a memory — the real ones standing dark and quiet at the edge, their reflections warmer somehow, golden where the trunks are grey, as if the water knows something the forest doesn’t. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. The last light comes in sideways, threading itself between the pines, landing on the moss in small patches of impossible green. The kind of green that makes you stop walking.

I stopped walking.

This is what I didn’t tell you, when you asked if it gets lonely out here. That sometimes I stand at the edge of a lake in the last ten minutes of afternoon light and feel the very particular feeling of being a person inside a story — not watching it, not passing through, but in it, bone-deep, boots damp, coffee going cold in the thermos.

There’s a story I’m writing and photographing. I won’t say too much about it yet. But I will say that I come here for it — into the deep Morvan forests, dog trotting ahead, pack on my back — and I wait for the light to do this, exactly this, and then I understand another piece of it.

The forest gives things up slowly.
You have to be willing to wait.

Monday

The roots come for you in the dark.

Not aggressively — the forest has more dignity than that. But they’re there, spreading from the base of the old tree like sentences that refuse to end, like arguments made in slow motion over centuries. Grey and deliberate in the last of the light. Patient in a way that makes you feel, by comparison, very small and very temporary.

I know I shouldn’t trip here. I know this with the specific clarity that comes from being alone, deep in the forest, out of signal range, with a dog whose emergency response strategy is essentially sit close to me and look happy. So I watch my feet. I watch the roots. I move the way you move when the forest asks you to pay attention — which is slowly, and with respect, and with the full knowledge that out here, there is no one to call. No signal.

And then something shifts.

The birds change their language. The sounds rearrange themselves into something else, less familiar. A crack somewhere to the left — what was that — and suddenly every nerve is awake, every sense leaning forward into the dark. The adrenaline arrives clean and certain, the way it does when your body remembers, before your mind catches up, that you are an animal in a forest.

People ask if this is responsible.

I think about the A2 on a Monday evening. Headlights and tail-lights as far as you can see, everyone hungry, everyone desperate to get home, two tonnes of metal at 130 kilometres an hour, bumper to bumper, driven by — well, at least some of them — people running on empty in every sense of the word.

Tell me again, dear worried ones, where exactly the danger is.

Tuesday

The basin in front of the house holds the evening like a secret.

Trees that are perfectly ordinary in daylight become something else entirely when the sky turns and the water catches it — dark lines fracturing across turquoise, branches dissolving into veins, the whole familiar world rearranged into something that looks more like the inside of a dream than a Tuesday evening in Burgundy.

I didn’t go far today. Sometimes you don’t have to.
Sometimes the forest comes to you.

Wednesday

March cannot make up its mind. Or rather — it has made up its mind entirely, in two directions at once.

Look down: winter is still here, heavy and unhurried, the ferns burnt copper and collapsed against the dark soil, the old fence post holding its ground with the patience of something that has seen many seasons come and go and is in no particular rush about this one.

Look up: spring has already arrived and is not waiting for anyone’s permission. Blossom after blossom, soft and extravagant and faintly outrageous against the bare branches, pink against grey against gold — as if someone turned up the colour in just the top half of the world and forgot about the rest.

Two seasons in one frame. One breath of winter, one of something warmer.

That’s the Morvan for you. Never quite what you expect. Always, somehow, exactly right.

Thursday

There are days on the mountain that are just work.

Pruning until your shoulders ache. Mowing in long uneven strips. Gathering wood for an outdoor fire with the specific grim satisfaction of a person who knows exactly how cold the nights still get. Sowing a flower border and silently promising to water it this time. By late afternoon I was dust and sweat and garden, hair escaping in all directions, socks with opinions of their own.

I sat down in the sun to recover.
And found I wasn’t alone.

He was already there, this neighbour of mine, perfectly still on the warm stone beside the water. Scales in a green that shouldn’t exist outside of a jeweller’s window — electric, iridescent, shifting between emerald and gold depending on how the light chose to fall. Compact and streamlined and unhurried in the way of creatures who know they are faster than anything that might come for them.

We regarded each other with equal curiosity.
He was, objectively, the better-looking of the two of us. I chose not to dwell on this.

We sat together for a while in the easy silence of two beings who had both had a full day and were simply glad of the sun. Then he spotted a small spider and dealt with it efficiently, and I decided that was my cue for a hot shower.

Some meetings don’t need to be longer than they are.

Friday

While I slept.

Two badgers, just after midnight, making their unhurried way down the driveway as if they owned it. The trail camera watched them in silence, green-tinged and patient, recording what the dark gets up to when no one is looking.

Uninvited, technically. Unannounced, certainly.

There’s something quietly wonderful about knowing that the moment I close my eyes, this place keeps living — that the darkness here is full and busy and entirely unbothered by me. That the mountain doesn’t stop just because I’ve gone to bed.

They felt safe here. Moving through the night without fear, without hurry, hopefully without a single thought of danger.

I know the feeling.
It’s exactly why I stay.

Saturday

The last thing you do before bed, when you live on a mountain, is take the dog out for a final late-night wee.

No streetlights here. No hum of traffic. Just the Morvan night, which is — and I mean this in the most official sense possible — one of the darkest skies in Europe. An International Dark Sky Reserve, if you want the certificate to prove it. The stars out here are not decorative. They are serious. Unreasonably, almost aggressively beautiful, spread across the black in a way that makes you feel both very small and inexplicably glad to be alive.

The dog sniffed around. I stood still and looked up to the stars.

And then.

A sound from somewhere in the darkness. Close — I think. Possibly very close. A deep, resonant call, unhurried, rolling out across the valley like something ancient checking in.

The Eurasian Eagle-Owl. Bubo bubo. One of the largest owls in the world, roughly twice the size of a long-eared owl, with eyes the colour of burning amber. Others have actually spotted one here. I never have. But I know that sound, and I stood there in the cold starlight, completely still, while he called his name into the night.

He could see me, almost certainly. Those eyes are built for exactly this — for the dark, for the distance, for spotting the little peeing creature, and the larger creature standing on the driveway and trying not to breathe too hard…

I went to bed with the window wide open.

His call came in with the cold air for a long time. Somewhere between a lullaby and a reminder that this place belongs to more than just me.

In the morning it was the woodpecker who took over — hammering the world awake with the subtlety of a small construction crew. Then a second one joined in. Of course.

So. To all my dear, sweet, wonderfully concerned friends who ask, with furrowed brows and kind intentions, whether I’m really alright up there — all alone on my French mountain, no neighbours, no signal, just a dog of questionable defensive capability and a head full of stories —

I want you to know that last night I stood under ten thousand stars and listened to an eagle-owl call from the dark.

I am devastated by how lonely it is.

Here's the thing — stories like this one take time. Time wandering alone into forests with a dog and a thermos of coffee. Time standing at the edge of a lake waiting for the light to do something ridiculous. Time finding words for things that were mostly just felt. From January 2026, not everything I write will be free — but for roughly the price of one very good coffee a month, you get all of it. The eagle-owls, the badgers, the lizards who are better-looking than me, and whatever the Morvan decides to throw at us next. Come along properly — it's worth it, I promise.

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You don’t always have to cross a continent to find something worth photographing. Sometimes you just have to step outside after a morning rain, crouch down on a wet forest path, and look. This week, in two places I think of as home, something ancient and unstoppable is happening: the common toad (Bufo bufo) is on the move.

In Friesland, in the flat north of the Netherlands with ditches and reed beds and sky in every direction, the volunteers are out with their buckets and headtorches, ferrying toads across roads that were laid long after the ponds were already there. And here in the Morvan — this rough granite plateau in the heart of Burgundy where I am staying on what I call ‘my mountain’ — the same drama is unfolding on a smaller, quieter stage. We have a long driveway here that curves around our pond on both sides, forming a kind of toad roundabout; at this time of year, you can barely take a step without one plodding purposefully across your path.

What is the toad migration?

Every spring, as soil temperatures creep above 5°C and the first proper rains arrive, common toads emerge from their winter hiding places and set off for the pond, ditch, or puddle where they were born. They navigate by smell, by memory, possibly by magnetic field. They are not fast, but they are absolutely determined — capable of travelling up to four kilometres in search of water and a mate.

The males leave first. When they find a female, they grip her from behind in a clasp called amplexus and refuse to let go, sometimes for days, hitching a ride all the way to the water. It is not romantic in any Hollywood sense. It is, however, one of the most tenacious acts in nature. And it produces those long, bead-like strings of eggs — black dots suspended in clear jelly — that you find draped through the shallows of every suitable pond in March.

On my hillside in the Morvan, the forest exhales after rain. The silence is deep enough to hear your own heartbeat — and, if you are lucky, the soft rustle of a toad moving through last autumn's leaves.

The Morvan is an ancient, unhurried place. Its ponds are dark and cold, edged with rushes and grey alder and thick cushions of moss on every rock and root. It is exactly the kind of landscape where you believe, easily, that toads have been doing this for millions of years — because they have.

For wild toads the journey is full of hazard. Hedgehogs eat them; grass snakes eat them; cars kill them in horrifying numbers. The toad’s main defence is a mild toxin secreted from skin glands — a complex brew that makes most predators spit them out in disgust. It is not nothing, but it is not much against a wheel. The volunteers in Friesland know this. That is why they are out there.

If cornered, a toad has one more card to play: it puffs itself up, stiffens its legs, and tilts its body toward whatever is threatening it — doing its best impression of something large and not worth the trouble. I have only witnessed this once, and it stopped me in my tracks. A toad standing its ground is a surprisingly moving sight.

On photographing them

Many wildlife photographers head out at night for toad photography — torch in one hand, flash in the other — and they get striking results. The darkness simplifies the background, and a well-placed flashgun can make wet toad skin look like burnished bronze. I understand the appeal.

But I made a different choice. Shining a bright torch directly at an animal that is mid-migration, already stressed by the exertion of its journey, felt like an intrusion I wasn’t comfortable with. Instead, I went out in daylight — on overcast mornings just after rain, when the light is soft and even, the toads are still moving, and the forest floor is glistening. No flash, no torch, no artificial light of any kind. Just the toad, the moss, the wet leaves, and whatever the sky was offering.

It requires more patience than night shooting. The light is lower, the conditions less controllable. But the images have a quality I find harder to achieve with flash — something quieter and more honest. Here is what I have learned along the way.

10 tips for toad photography

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This morning I woke up to the sun. Spring bulbs pushing through the soil. A quiet garden.

And then I opened my phone.

Again. Still. Images of destruction, the same headlines, the same countries I know — not from the news, but from the inside. From narrow streets that smelled of cumin and woodsmoke. From kitchens where someone’s grandmother handed me something warm without asking if I was hungry, because of course I was, and of course she would feed me.

I have traveled extensively in several of the countries that are now, quite literally, under fire. I did so as part of a photography project that in hindsight was one of the most quietly radical things I’ve ever been part of: we followed bread.

That’s it. Bread.

And what bread does — what it has always done — is lead you straight to the most ordinary, decent people on earth. The baker who starts at 3am. The woman who slaps dough against the wall of a clay oven with a confidence that comes from forty years of doing exactly this. The family that insists you sit down, that pulls out an extra chair, that will not hear of you leaving without eating something first.

Tehran. Isfahan. Beirut. Tripoli. Dubai.

In each of these places, a camera pointed at bread meant a camera pointed at hospitality. At dignity. At people who had no interest in being symbols of anything — they just wanted to make something good and share it.

That is what I keep thinking about this morning.

Not because I’m looking away from the news. I’m not. I read it. I feel it. The weight of it is real.

But I’ve been asking myself what my role is in all of this, with my camera and my archive of images. And I keep coming back to the same answer: I don’t think my job is to add more pictures of destruction to a world already drowning in them. There are photographers doing that work, important work, necessary work. That’s not what I have.

What I have are images of the other side. The baker. The chance encounter in a doorway. The peaceful courtyard you stumble into by accident. The colors of a market at seven in the morning. The interior of a home where someone was clearly, carefully proud of every object on the shelf.

So today I’m sharing a random selection of those images below. People, moments, small pieces of beauty from countries that are now under fire. Not as a statement. Not as a counter-narrative or a political act. Just as a reminder — for myself as much as anyone — that this is what is also there. This is what exists. This is what is worth protecting.

Because if we only ever look at what is being destroyed, we risk forgetting what destruction actually costs.

I want to keep my world. The one I found through a lens, through bread, through an open door. I want to keep the baker, the garden, the grandmother with flour on her hands.

Let me keep that.

I could go on. And on. Because the stories are there, and so are the images.

But let me end with this.

Bread is made from four ingredients. Flour, water, salt, time. That’s it. And yet, every single time we walked into a bakery — in Teheran, in Beirut, in Tripoli, in Dubai — it opened something. A conversation. A story. A shared laugh. Hands that reached across a counter to give us something warm before we even asked.

Nobody was performing hospitality. Nobody was making a political statement. They were just baking bread. And we were just there, curious, trying not to judge before we’d even sat down.

We keep wondering: would the men who are currently deciding the fate of these countries — the ones with the beards, the ones with the USA caps, the ones with the podiums and the arsenals — would any of them have the patience to stand in a bakery for an afternoon and just listen? Just eat? Just be ordinary for a moment?

Bread won’t stop wars. I know that.

But we have never once left a bakery feeling like the world was beyond saving. There is something in the act of making bread — the patience it demands, the sharing it assumes — that the loudest voices in the room seem to have completely forgotten.

Four ingredients. A hot oven. Two people who don’t speak the same language.

It’s not nothing. It never was.

And on that note — my webshop is open today.

Limited edition Fine Art Prints. Images from Lebanon, Korea, and Tanzania. Face Not Included. Enjoy!

Take me to the webshop

People have often been at the center of my work.

For years, the face was everything — the point of connection, the place where a portrait either lives or doesn’t. I’ve built series around faces. Exhibited them. Been recognized for them. Won the ‘World Portrait Award’. The face, for a portrait photographer, is the whole story. But is it?

What if I take a d…

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Before you start thinking I’ve permanently retreated into the misty, ethereal forests of the Morvan—endlessly chasing fog, trees, and atmospheric haze—let me share a portrait from a completely different world. This was captured in Uganda while I was working with the incredible @breadprojectworldwide, an initiative founded by Johan Pater.⁣⁣

What I love most about my craft and my approach to photography is that diversity sits at the very heart of what I do. 𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐱𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧. From silent woodland wanderings to vibrant human connections across continents—this is the range I live for.⁣⁣

⁣