#24: Early Works

So one of the last rooms, it's actually the very first work that I did. So there's this in between, which shows very early work from the early 90s. When I was just starting out, I studied fashion for 2 years before I started studying photography. At the time, I was also briefly working as a model. By doing that, I got to know a lot of photographers and to work with them. I think it was one of the main reasons why I decided that I wanted to be not a fashion designer, but a photographer.

I wanted to be able to make the image. I also found out that I was not that's interested in making clothes in fashion itself, but I was much more interested in the image, looking at fashion, photography, in magazines, et cetera.

I think at the time, I was still very young and being a model, working as a model also meant that often the photographers were male, and sometimes I was struggling with this kind of male gaze. I think putting the camera on myself, making these self portraits was also a way to kind of regain the power over my own body and over my own image.

The funny thing is that you can see here in this very early work that I was already working with collage and also painting or scratching or using a black adding on my pictures. And it was funny because I totally forgot about this. It was only when I went back into my archives and really investigating my old archives from the very early days that I just realized that a lot of things, a lot of elements that I'm working on now already were there from the very start.