Tjipke Meijer
Photography has been my passion as long as I can remember.
The magic to re-create the world around me has always fascinated me. I came to understand that with photography you can frame the world around you, leave out the ugly, the bad, the disaster. I was able to create my own beauty. To frame my own world. I was able to deal with the imperfections of my live by framing it how I wanted it to be.
After my education at the AKI, Academy for art and industrial design in Enschede, a small town in The Netherlands, I have always worked as a professional photographer. I have explored the fields of fashion, interior design and architecture. The last 10 years I have traveled all over the world for my work as a corporate photographer. It gave me the opportunity to see different places and cultures and to meet all kinds of people. That is very inspiring but there is more. It also made me realise that to keep me breathing I needed to make art in a non commercial way, without boundaries of an assignment or client. I needed to create contemporary photography, and I kept, next to the assignments for commercial photography, working on my artwork. Each photo is the result of a process in which I am searching for beauty in the non beauty, a perfect image, which exposes tension and questions you about beauty.
When you look at my work, at first it may seem as an ordinary image, but it has an elusive undertone; if you take a closer look you will see that there is beauty in the downfall, in the decay, in the lifelessness around us That is my starting point.
I don't want to force my opinion on you, with every photo you can see beauty at a glance. If you look with more attention, the beauty of decay will emerge.
About my work
The series entitled "Wilting" is a series of photos of various flowers. The photos capture the moment of the flower just past its peak.
When I see a flower at first when it is in full bloom I'm always wondering, is this it? Will you still be beautiful when you start wilting? Will you see the same in these flowers as you see in people when they get older? Can you see the purity of life in the dying of a flower as you can see in the silence of a person passed away? Each photo illustrates the beauty that was there. And therein lies new beauty.
At the moment, the focus is on flowers, but I am exploring whether there are more interfaces with the beauty of transience, but always with a beauty created at first glance, trying to find the answer to what is more beautiful; the beauty itself or the transience of beauty.
You can find other work by Tjipke at here