Wibe Koopman (1993) graduated from the university of the arts Utrecht in 2022. He works as a freelance photographer and writer.
I feel not solemnly bound to the medium of photography, but I hold a great love for it. It is mainly because of the tension between how it can work and what it cannot do. It is somewhat restrictive in what it can communicate to a viewer, and this is very interesting to explore. For me, photographs work as a sort of quotes or questions. I’ve been here, I’ve seen this, this exists here, what do you see, how do you feel? In this lies its validity for me I think. You actually need a lot of imagination to make photographs or to be able to percieve one, maybe even more than in making or percieving a painting for example. I love that when photographing, one has to make use of the real world around, that I am in a direct way bound to this real world and its phenomena. And that by being anywhere, busy photographing, my body, is part of the photographs I take. A viewer can feel this when looking at these photographs in a completely differend place and projects him or herself into what is depicted. A photograph is a very bodily thing I think, it is very closely connected to the bodie and its senses.
In practice, I use photographs to make a gesture towards a story i’ve been working on. A series of photographs can become a story of its own offcourse. But because I like to write, and I am interested in what photographs can and cannot show or tell, I like to combine my photographic work with tekst. Because tekst has the ability to show and tell things a photograph can not show or tell. I use texts to show what is not to be seen, and I use the medium of photography for the phenomena that are not easy to describe by words.
Education
Graphic Lyceum Rotterdam, photography
University of the Arts Utrecht, photography
Internship 'Radical Reversibility'
Collaborations
Making portraits in collaboration with Diederik Veerman for 50th anniversary World Forum The Hague,
Photographing a banner for the project CaribbeanTies, Museon The Hague.
Writing a foreword for 'Sometimes a Photograph' exhibition, Artides Amsterdam
Writing Contribution tekst for the University of the Arts Utrecht, Graduation Cataloque '22