The hidden beauty of objects

I believe every object has beauty in it. Not as a nice thought, but as something practical. You only have to bring it out.

Take that button on the fabric. In itself it is nothing. A button. You look straight past it. But give it good light, choose the right viewpoint, the right lens, and make sure the technique underneath is right, and suddenly it is not a button anymore. It is a jewel. You start to love it.

And I never get tired of that moment. It arrives on the screen, often within a few seconds, and after all these years it still makes me happy.

That works with almost anything. The art is in making it visible.

Screws. Nobody has ever asked to have a good look at a screw. Then you put the light where it belongs and there they are, sharp and metallic and almost a little dangerous. I love that.

My clients often do not know what they have. Not out of indifference. They simply do not have the time for it. And then, as the photographer, I get to look at that one product for hours (if I’m lucky). That is a privilege. Quite often I have the feeling that I am the first person to see this beauty.

Two examples.

The three decanters. A lot of time went into those before the glass behaved the way I wanted it to. We call it material expression, but that phrase does not cover it. What matters is that you can see in the image that somebody came to love that glass.

Look at the background as well. That warm amber is a colour I keep returning to, in this photograph and in plenty of my other work. I never decided on it. It simply keeps turning up.

And that stack of white collars. It lies there as if somebody had simply dropped it down. That is not what happened. White on white is difficult, and carelessness is the hardest thing of all to make (ask my clients). I am still quietly pleased with that one.

Then the Dopper bottle.

The first time I saw one I thought: what am I supposed to do with this. A plastic bottle, it is not exactly handsome. And now you see that thing, that famous Dopper bottle, everywhere.

A plastic bottle is very easy to finish off in the standard way. Plenty of soft light without direction, camera more or less straight in front of it. Done! That is the average packshot. Tidy, safe, and really product registration rather than doing anything with light. I do not get very excited about that.

So I went looking for the place where that bottle was beautiful. And halfway through, it turns. You find the angle where the plastic catches the light, the shape comes up out of the background, and there it is. That is a wonderful feeling. A sudden little ‘lekkerrrrrr’ feeling!

Until now I have always preferred photographing things to photographing people. That sounds unkind, but there is a simple reason. A person has a mood, a schedule, and at some point gets bored. Quite rightly too. An object does not. With an object you can keep going as long as you like, and if you lie awake thinking it could be better, you just start again the next morning. Plenty of photographers wanted nothing to do with dead objects, which suited me beautifully, because I did.

And that is exactly where I learned it. Light, viewpoint, framing, lens. An object does not complain when you move it one centimetre for the fourteenth time. Absolutely great!

I got part of that from Jurriaan Eindhoven. A wonderful photographer, and an absolutely great inspirer, monumental. Whatever he made, afterwards he thought: it could be more beautiful. Put time into that and you slowly get better at bringing that beauty to the surface. It is dangerous, because of course you can go on forever.

I have been doing this long enough now to say something I would not have said years ago: I am simply good at this. And I enjoy it as much as I did at the beginning.

And then something funny happens. I am someone who loves a challenge, and part of the challenge here has fallen away. Not the pleasure, that is still there. I still get excited about an object nobody looks at twice.

But the difficulty has moved. It has moved to people. You cannot shift a person one centimetre fourteen times over, and that is exactly what makes it interesting. My Fuji is asking for it too. I am rather looking forward to it. More about that another time.

Do you have a product you think there is not much to see in? Those are usually the best ones. Let me know and I will come and look. Those jobs are my favourites.