When he opens his eyes, Wout Berger sees the IJsselmeer
The Dutch photographer Wout Berger lives in the small town of Uitdam, on the big body of freshwater near Amsterdam called the IJssel lake, ‘het IJsselmeer’. Every day when he opens his eyes, it is the first thing he sees. He lives in his subject. In 2009 he started photographing it regularly and now, at the end of 2012, his beautiful book has appeared, When I Open My Eyes, with 64 of the some 150 photographs he took over the course of two and a half years. At the De Pont museum in Tilburg there is an exhibition of a number of large prints from the series, through Jan. 6th, 2013. A wonderful photograph by Wout Berger of skaters on the frozen IJsselmeer was also included in the exhibition curated by Maartje van den Heuvel for our project ‘Sweet&Salt: Water and the Dutch’. His approach to photography is: ‘I try to show what you see when you focus on what is right in front of you.’ Read the article…