Niels Roest’s creative efforts begin by capturing mundane subjects that evoke the awareness that time is passing. These still life details are modest disruptions of everyday scenario’s that reveal the unconscious ways we conduct our lives. By doing so, Niels considers the relationship between history on an existential level and the capturing qualities of photography.
He uses his accumulated archive of images as a starting point to explore ways to interfere with the apparent transparency of photography as a medium, emphasising its status as a means for visual representation. By working with various analogue and digital techniques he is giving form to a visual vocabulary characterised by various degrees of abstraction.
“…The beginning of almost all my projects can be traced back to a single event. This event started with the simple urge to go for a bike ride. An urge to go out during the first corona lockdown. After cycling for a few kilometres I saw a road sign indicating the direction of the beach. Not knowing that the beach was still more than 60 km away, I decided that I wanted to go to that beach. I had no food or water with me and all the stores were closed due to the lockdown. It was only me along with my bicycle and camera. When I finally arrived at the beach I took a single photo, perhaps just to justify my crazy idea of cycling to the beach, then turned around and started cycling back home. The photo was a snapshot and not even of the beach or the sea, but of a rabbit corpse that was recently hit by a car. I had immortalized a scene that would otherwise have faded into oblivion. I had recorded something that had been given a right to exist again. A photo that took me 117 km to get. I wanted to repeat this entire act of physical exhaustion for image making in a conscious way…”