You sometimes see them popping up on Facebook: idyllic photos of landscapes, seas or the universe. You unsuspectingly scroll on, not realising that such pictures could be rather fake. In addition to fake news, we are also inundated with fake images, but you don't really hear about that. Or do you? In his work, photographer Sander van der Bij likes to play with the images we have of the landscape as well as photography itself: ‘If you look more closely at my work, you will see that there are things that don't add up.’
Savage rock formations, glittering glaciers and dizzying celestial bodies: Sander van der Bij must have quite a few stamps in his passport, judging by the diverse natural areas seen in his work. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the photographer says he never leaves his studio at De Biotoop in Haren. Using everyday materials such as polystyrene, yoghurt and sugar, Van der Bij constructs 3D models and miniatures, which he then photographs and edits into a 2D final product: the digital photograph. Van der Bij: ‘People wonder why I put so much effort into making a mountain landscape out of polystyrene, only to make it two-dimensional again. The medium of photography makes it a completely different end product. If you were to see my maquettes, you would probably think: is this what he makes it out of?’
"The medium of photography makes it a completely different end product." Sander van der Bij
NOT JUST A SATELLITE PHOTO
Van der Bij is not the only artist fascinated by using the possibilities of the medium of photography in the landscape genre. The exhibition Simulacrum recently opened at Noorderlicht photo gallery, in which several artists explore what exactly makes a landscape a landscape through digital simulations and images. Is a landscape still ‘real’ when it is composed of nothing but pixels? Van der Bij also operates at the boundary of fiction and reality in his work: ‘Photography in the past was a medium to record something. With that in mind, we still look at photos nowadays. I like to play with that very concept. At an exhibition of my work, everyone asks: where did you take this picture?’
Talking between a candyfloss machine and an empty aquarium, it is hard to imagine that people do not realise that Van der Bij's creations do not ‘really’ exist. But to be fair, his mountain landscapes and aerial photographs are hard to distinguish from landscape images as we know them from, say, BBC Earth or NASA. According to him, the fact that people do not doubt the authenticity of his images is mainly due to the use of cliché aspects from landscape photography in his work: ‘You very quickly have a landscape when you work with a horizon. Everyone has seen a picture like that, so you immediately make that association. In terms of composition, they really are archetypes. I throw off the viewer by using those archetypes.’
"I throw off the viewer by using archetypes." Sander van der Bij
Van der Bij makes no secret of the fact that his landscapes are created in the studio. He talks openly about it and his exhibited works are accompanied by texts on the wall. Is he not afraid that this information will make his images less powerful? ‘In my experience, when people see an exhibition, they really only see images. Sometimes you really have to tell someone they are miniatures, because it does give it a different connotation. In terms of content, I find it interesting that I can recreate a mountain landscape with a piece of aluminium foil. With photography, you can suggest those images by being able to show something very selectively.’
CANDYFLOSS COSMOS
Take Van der Bij's latest project as an example, in which he creates representations of the cosmos out of yoghurt and candyfloss. According to him, these representations of astronomical phenomena are a lot more ‘real’ than NASA's famous Hubble images: ‘Everything in my work is about reality, and then when I check with NASA, it's quite debatable. You don't know that cosmos: you've never seen it. Yet candyfloss and yoghurt are things you can understand.’
According to Van der Bij, his creations come about completely randomly. Every day, he goes to Action, the supermarket or the hardware store in search of materials with ‘potential’, which he then sets to work with: ‘It's just seeing what you can make with things around you every day, then you find out what works. It started with a candyfloss tray from Action: now I have a candyfloss machine and several jars of sugar. I draw a lot of inspiration from the material and try to use it differently, so you don't immediately understand what you are looking at.’
PHOTOGRAPHIC GUILE
To get closer to the boundary between what is real and unreal, Van der Bij invites the viewer to study his creations more carefully: ‘People often just accept images, but I also want them to look a bit closer. Because then you suddenly see things that don't make sense. It is also that you want to make people aware of how easy it can be: take a small piece of polystyrene, add some paint and you have a mountain landscape.’ Even at a time when we are bombarded with CGI images in films and photoshopped models in magazines, we still tend to believe that photographs show something real. ‘Photography is a medium that people expect to rely on reality, but I want to show how fake photographs can be. Many people also just get angry because they think I am lying. I do record something from reality, just not where you would expect it to be.’