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Two Vendors

A typical scene of food stalls at a festival in Asakusa, Tokyo.

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Tokyo shop guardian

This shop keeper must have been inspired by the traditional ferocious creatures that guard temples and the like.

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Flowermarket

Preparing garlands at the all-night flower market in Bangkok.

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Tokyo seafood JOINT

One of the many superb ‘enter and eat’ seafood places in Tokyo.

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Dutch drizzle

A typical grey day in a northern Dutch town.

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IZAkaya

One of the 100,000 eateries in Tokyo, this one is found in a backstreet of Asakusa.

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Ayuthya cocks

Commemorating a solution by a Burmese King, who was tired of the many wars he fought with Thailand, and who decided instead to have cock-fights held to determine the victor. In Ayutthaya – Temple of a Thousand Roosters.

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Sukhotai monks remembered

Sukhothai, one of the old Thai capitals.

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My life as a photographer began in Rotterdam at the age of eleven when I could afford an Agfa Clack, which was a glorified box camera producing 6 x 9 cm negatives. My pocket money allowed me to buy not more than one roll of 120 film for a month. Those rolls produced eight negatives, which meant that I had to be extremely careful in selecting my subjects. But this severe limit to the number of pictures I could take was, in retrospect, a good thing.

I got into the habit of doing a lot of photography in my mind without using the camera. Mental photography. Aside from envisaging compositions, one can imagine 
how to solve the great challenges of compromises between depth of field and freezing movement. A small lens opening meant great depth of field (sharpness from back to front) and long exposure. But the long exposure meant that you could not freeze movement. Figuring out what to choose with this perennial photographic dilemma is a habit that has stayed with me, even though today it is hardly relevant anymore. But in those early days, in which the machine gun approach to photography was unthinkable, my habits were not shaped by the thought, common today, that bursts from the shutter might produce a single good photograph.

Chinatown

Setting up for the evening trade in Chinatown, Bangkok.

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Engagement in Asakusa

Exquisite details can be important in street photography. They need not be immediately apparent. The one here can only be observed by looking at it in an enlarged version of the image. The farthest away from the eye shows a young couple interacting with each other over the offerings chest of the famous is Asakusa Temple. They talked, reached out with their hands, and finally kissed. This cannot, I think, have been anything else but an improvised engagement ceremony.

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Along a Thai road

Thailand is a country of great scenes that are entirely outside the tourist trap of the well known temples and beaches.  It is littered with scenes such as this one.

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Generation duplicat

Like mother like daughter.

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Monks on vacation

These three monks take the time to capture their visit to a giant Buddha statue.

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Living along the canal

This family’s Bangkok canal house stands out for the details of domestic existence cramped into very small space along a canal. 

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FIRST MEETING GREAT FRENCH STARS

My son Sebastian’s his first beachside meeting with two of France’s cinema greats.

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A quick nap between 12hour shifts

This Bangkok flower grabs a quick nap between rounds of supplying the never ending Bangkok flower market.

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