I spent most of my life in Europe, but had the chance to go to San Francisco for six months as an exchange student at the San Francisco Art Insitute in 1992. It was an amazing time for me and I guess I was a bit lucky in terms of the timing, this was just before Silicon Valley was booming and as a result of that, San Francisco became a gentrified hub. As an art student at the S.F.A.I., I had permanent access to the darkrooms, the labs and the studios 24/7 which was an incredible luxury. Back at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam there was nothing like it, at the time there wasn’t even a proper darkroom. I thrived in S.F and photographed a lot with my analogue cameras; an Olympus T4 and a plastic Holga that I bought for 2 dollars in Chinatown. The Holga was leaking light and had a terrible lens, but because of that the images often turned out dreamlike and surreal. The Holga series (Death Valley and Alactraz) are photographic accidents out of control, with overlapping double exposures and half destroyed negatives.
