Mise-en-scène, staged. Photo Ton Zijlstra, CC BY SA NC
During a 2015 visit to the Boymans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, mentioned in the previous photo, for the ‘Design Derby’ exhibit, I took this photo. I printed it for the frames on my window sills, because I’ve always been hesitant in putting photos in frames around the house. It often feels staged to me when I encounter them in other people’s homes, look who we met, look where we’ve been, here’s me, here’s us. I guess these days that’s also what the Facebook and Instagram timeline is being used for. Or it looks neglected, old photos discolored from years of sunlight, after a while unseen and later still turned invisible to the people living there. An old stage, where nothing much happens anymore. This one therefore counts as a warning amongst the other images currently framed, it’s all in scène gezet, staged. A reminder to self to replace the images regularly, to be exchanged for other pictures that caught my eye, whimsical choices. Not to tell a story to visitors. Meaningless in themselves, gaining meaning only from the story about when I took it, and why I find it interesting to look at it again for a while.
Now that we haven’t been able to travel much and the daily scenery isn’t much different from day to day, I’ve taken to browsing through my Flickr photo archive where I keep over 30.000 photos of the past 16 years. Last week I printed a number of photos to put in the frames on the window sills of my home office. I will be posting some of them here this week.