I am a documentary photographer based in North Carolina, working primarily in black and white. My photographs explore everyday life: people, places, public spaces, rituals, gestures, and the small details through which a culture reveals itself.

My interest in this kind of photography began long before I had a name for it.

I grew up in Eygelshoven, a small village in the south of the Netherlands shaped by two underground coal mines, four churches, and, at one time, some twenty pubs. I received my first point-and-shoot camera in the early 1970s. Like most people, I photographed family and vacations, but I was equally drawn to what was happening around me: the annual village fair, church processions, local landmarks, and especially people.

Looking back, those early photographs already contained much of what continues to interest me today: the ordinary life of a particular place at a particular moment.

Over the years, living in Europe, Australia, South Africa, and, since 2011, the United States deepened my interest in how people live, how communities express themselves, and how much can be learned simply by paying attention to everyday life.

I explored many photographic genres along the way, but gradually returned to where I had begun: people, places, and the world immediately around me.

Today my work is centered on documentary photography and photographic essays. I am less interested in extraordinary events than in ordinary life, the things we pass every day and may no longer notice.

I work observationally. I photograph what I encounter rather than construct scenes or direct the people within them. I prefer to spend time looking, moving through a place, and allowing situations to develop rather than beginning with a predetermined image in mind.

I also follow the principles of straight photography. Post-processing is deliberately restrained and limited primarily to black-and-white conversion when working digitally, exposure and tonal adjustments, cropping, and the removal of technical imperfections. I want the finished photograph to remain faithful to the moment from which it came.

That does not make a photograph objective. The photographer is always making choices: where to stand, when to release the shutter, what to include within the frame, and what to leave outside it. I do not try to disguise that subjectivity. Instead, I try to begin with observation rather than conclusion; to look closely before deciding what something means.

In many ways, my photography has come full circle, from photographing the everyday life of a small mining village in the Netherlands to continuing that same practice in the places where I live and travel today.

The geography has changed. The underlying impulse has not: to pay attention, to observe without imposing a narrative too quickly, and to make a record of life as I encounter it.