“If you look around you, you see that everything is colored.” Poet K. Schippers typified our world with this observation. Everything is colour: the same goes for contemporary photography, from professional to selfie. Because of this you sometimes forget how much expressiveness black and white photos can have.
The photo book Time and Tide wait for no man van Siebe Swart is an exception to that hegemony of color. Along the coastlines of our country, Swart (1957) photographed tidal areas and transitional landscapes in intense deep black and contrasting silver-white sunlight. The book is a diptych with the exhibition of the same name in Museum Panorama Mesdag in The Hague (now closed due to corona). Emptiness, space, endlessness and what you could call visible silence are the key words.
The book is not just an accompanying publication, it is an independent work of art. The somewhat rough paper feels like you are running your hand over beach sand. The photos are on fold-out pages of sometimes 135 centimeters in width, which produces a special effect, as if the panoramic expanse of the landscape opens up before your eyes. Swart himself describes the series as “a personal voyage of discovery along the Dutch coast, reflection of wanderings along the coastline during storms, ebb and flow, at night and low tide, falling darkness or rising sun”.
Beauty and threat
There is also something hidden in these words of the threat posed by tides: this liquid landscape of the North Sea, Wadden Sea and the former Zuiderzee does not care about humans, as Hans Steketee, editor of this newspaper, describes in the accompanying essay. Also the recent film and the photo book Silence of the Tides by filmmaker Pieter-Rim de Kroon show the beauty and threat of the changing tide in the Wadden Sea Region.
Swart works at locations such as Uithuizerwad, Punt van Reide, Het Zwin and Zoutelande with multiple cameras, the images of which he edited together. The strict boundary of the horizon is always fascinating, with sometimes a brightly shining sun above it and the foreground of the beach, dune or salt marsh dark and murky.
There is more to it: the photos not only depict the tides, we also see the falling darkness or dawn in all imaginable shades. If you look closely, you can see the ‘colors’ of black and white photography.
Also read the interview with Siebe Swart: ‘I can’t separate photography and life’
#liquid #landscape #Dutch #coast