Today, we’re featuring a photo essay from film photographer Wout De Ridder. Scroll below to view the images and read more about the series Things to See and Forget About in Belgium…
Analog cameras and films used: Pentax 645 (Find at KEH Camera or on eBay) | Ilford HP5 (Find on Amazon), Ilford FP4 (Find on Amazon), Rollei Superpan 200 (Find on Amazon)
Connect with Wout De Ridder: Website | Instagram
Things to See and Forget About in Belgium
By Wout De Ridder
Ever since my father taught me how to use an SLR camera (the classic Pentax Spotmatic and Takumar lenses), film photography has been a companion offering another way of observing the world, focusing shots on events, nature, travel, and objects that all of a sudden spoke to me.
Long before any serious photograph would roll out of a printer, I got to discover the magic of darkroom printing in our attic (often with some New Wave music that seemed to be made for a dark, red light environment).
Some years, images were scarce, others more prolific, as in that decade that I worked for a travelling theater and unusual surroundings were common.
As to be expected, I also abandoned film a while when digital cameras started to offer comparable quality, at a much lower price per shot, and photo quality printers became affordable. Alas! How I betrayed you, mechanical wonders, and silver coated films.
By the time I came to my senses, medium format cameras that were unaffordable in the heydays of film were cheap, and I fell for the temptation to try a first generation Pentax 645. The 3D feel of that large viewfinder, and the shallow depth of field were an instant revelation, offering a subject isolation soon to inspire this image series.
Nowadays, I hold a film camera as much as I carry a digital one.
I also rediscovered darkroom printing, the art of taking a daft amount of time to fine-tune and print something unique with silver, gelatin, paper, and chemistry.
Things to See and Forget About in Belgium tells little stories of mundane objects in ordinary or more iconic surroundings. Banal… things you forget you saw, almost the same instant your eye fell upon them.
If you live in Belgium, that is… But what if you’re a visitor from Tokyo, Perth, Bamako, or Rio De Janeiro?
The concept of ‘ordinary’ changes quickly when you cross a border.
And let’s talk about time… in the five, six years I’ve been building this series, some of the buildings have already been razed to the ground, some things, like post boxes, already become rare or change shape.
Reality is far more elusive than we realise…
So please discover these slices of matter and time, printed on silver-gelatin baryta paper, to remember or discover these ordinary things.
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