For over thirty-five years, I`ve been a photographer. For over thirty-five years, I`ve been living on the IJsselmeer. When I open my eyes in the morning, the first thing I see is the IJsselmeer.
Sometimes I take a picture of it, but really seeing it is something else. Not until a friend of mine said to me, „You live in your subject matter“, did the penny drop. I placed a tripod at a fixed spot in front of the bedroom window and began to look.. At first you´re grateful for every sailboat that comes along. Every intense sky: a photograph. But before long you start keeping every distraction out of the picture. It´s what anyone open to the subject matter ends up doing. I no longer photograph sailboats. Nor do I photograph birds, or people. I do take pictures of little waves, patch of fog, rain and clouds. These, too, can be distracting; but their forms are almost always amorphous, transparent, wet. They scarcely have any color of their own, but they take on the color of light cast on them and then reflect that. Sixty photographs in all : together they make the IJsselmeer. No one photograph is nicer than another. If you start looking at photographs that way, you get lost in aesthetics. I´m not after aesthetics. I want to photograph wind, light-elements that we know only by their manifestations. (Wout Berger, excerpt from the artist´s statement in the book )

Wout Berger, *1941 in Ridderkerk, Netherlands. LLives and works in Uitdam, Netherlands.