1. A brief introduction about you – what you do, who you are, your interests how you came to do this project.

My name is Monique, I’ve been born and raised in Holland. I’ve been working as a social worker and body therapist for the last 20 years and as a hobby I’ve always been photographing and also travelling. In the eighties and nineties with an analogue camera, I developed black and white at home, since the 0’s I work with digital cameras. Mainly I have been concentrating myself on portrait photography, I am fascinated by people’s faces. The diversity, the beauty of it, young, old, of any country or culture, I love faces, the expression, to try to grasp who the person from is within and how and in which moment is it expressed and being shown to the outer world. As my interest in photography grew bigger I decided to study photography at the Photo Academy. I had my exam in 2014 and exposed my school final exhibition which contained a series of portraits of persons with Alzheimer disease.

I’ve never had much interest in taking photos of any other subject than portraits until I was challenged on Facebook by a friend to post photos from nature scenes for a week. It sure was a challenge since I never had been consciously taking pics from nature, except of course from famous sunsets at the sea and beaches. So there I started, I choose TREES as my subject of attention. I had so much pleasure in going into the nature, taking pics of trees and posting them. Since the beginning I have been adding poems to the photos. I had been doing this with the photos of my school exhibition too, putting photos together with texts…nature invited me to use poems…and so it started and with some breaks in between I’ve recently been posting my 86th tree-pic with poem.

2. A small brief why you picked up this project – of taking such beautiful photographs and thy way you attach poetry to it.

As I said before, I was curious about my skills of nature photography, wondering if I would have a feel for it or not. I kind of limited the subject NATURE to TREES, it helped me to choose and focus. At that moment I was counseling a 79-year-old man with Alzheimer, who became a dear friend of mine and he was always pointing out the beauty of trees to me. He grew up as a little kid in one of the few but beautiful forests that we have in Holland and as a ‘tribute ‘to this special friend (ship) I choose to stick to photographing trees. When at night I uploaded the photos to my pc and would start picking one photo that resonated most with me in that specific moment, I felt a strong need to express this personal resonance that I was getting from the photo, or that I was putting in the photo by editing it, and adding poems. To give the observer a little hint how she/he could have a look at the photo…as a little guideline.

3. Your interest in poetry – how did you come to know of so many poets? And how do you pick up a poem to your photograph?

Ooh I didn’t know so many poets…that was a fantastic discovery, a welcome and beautiful ‘collateral damage’ so to say, while traveling this road. I knew quiet some Sufi poets like Rumi, Hafiz, Rabia, Omar Khayyam and also some British poets like Shakespeare and Keats. In the beginning I would go through my books in search of the ‘right poem’, the poem that resonated most with the photo of that day. Later on I started using internet. The procedure more or less went like this, first I would choose a photo, then I would edit it and give the atmosphere which fitted most with my own state of that day, then I would try to find one simple word that was expressed by the photo, in my humble opinion of course. Then I would start looking for poems on internet. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of poems, the ones that would touch me most I started writing down in a special book, that I also use now. So this way I discovered poets I had never heard of, at least not consciously, like Walt Whitman…he writes beautiful poems about nature, I love them very much. Later on I found out that Robin Williams was quoting those famous words in Dead Poets Society: ‘Captain, oh Captain” that belong to Walt Whitman as well.

4. About the photographs themselves – they have such ‘poetic’ feel to them. How did you spot those photographs? I see that you do some creative editing on them. My question is – when you take a photograph, at the time of composition, do you know the final, edited image – how does the process work for you? Or, do you experiment with editing until you get what you want?

I never know the final result when I take the photo. By accident I discovered the double exposure button on my camera, which I had been using before on my Nikon gear with portraits and didn’t know Fujifilm was having. So many of the pictures are double exposed, and the way it is double exposed I decide in the moment of taking the photo. I look for the right composition, the balance between dark and light parts in the photo. Reflection and light versus dark, or dark versus light are themes that fascinate me and are constantly coming back in my work, so this is something I already decide in the moment. Later at home and having uploaded the photos, the photo can change completely into something else. Sometimes you don’t even recognize the original compared to the result. This process is the more creative part of the work for me, together with searching the poems. I kind of love to create magic spheres, magical landscapes, that become abstract, that show about the communication between light and dark, but also the communication between different colors and textures…possibilities are endless. But I do look for the magic in a landscape, and I love to be surprised.

5. You also told me that, doing this has touched you at some deep, personal level – can you tell us about it a little?

The whole process from deciding where to go to take pictures – I look for new areas in Holland were I have never been before, I look for the weather forecast, sometimes I get up before dawn to catch some beautiful light- , to taking the photo, to editing it, to searching a poem that fits to the image It’s quiet reflective and a meditative process. All through all those steps I am communicating with a deeper layer of myself, the process of editing is a constant opening myself up for what I see and reflecting to how it touches me. This being touched often gives new inspiration of where to go, in which direction to go with the editing. The whole series of photos that I did is in a way a personal voyage, a personal portrait as much as it isn’t. Sometimes I have the feeling I am tuning in with something that is much bigger and less personal than me, at the same time it is this humble me that is expressing something from within…or maybe from beyond?

6. Can you send one of your photographs?

Which ones would you like to have? You told you had been translating some of the poems, so maybe it is nice to add the photos that belong to the poems or vice versa.

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Credits:
Interview and translations by Swathikumari Bandlamudi and Nagaraju Pappu
All of Monique’s work can be seen in her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/monique.rossen
To read the Telugu version of the interview, click this link.

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