A Million Dollar View

"A Million Dollar View" started as a random meeting that became a friendship, exploring identity through photography.

Back in September 2019, in the small town Zandvoort by the west coast of The Netherlands, I met a woman walking her dog on the stormy beach.

Henny will be turning 72 and lives on the 6th floor of a concrete apartment building. She lives alone with Bella, her dog – her husband passed away five years ago. Together, she and her husband had moved in because of the apartment’s million dollar ocean view. They wanted to feel free, she told me one afternoon while smoking a cigarette in her kitchen.

Henny’s late husband had worked as a portrait photographer and she as a fashion stylist. From introducing me to this part of her life, Henny and I started working together, trying to capture a piece of her fabulous past.

We slowly, but steadily started to create a space that allowed us to explore her as a character by styling her in her own old clothes and embracing her perception of herself; her self-image. With Henny in the role of the stylist and me as the photographer – a dynamic reminding her of her late husband, Peter – the meetings became playful explorations of their shared past.

Suddenly the rampant COVID-19 entered our world and we were forced to put the collaboration on hold.

In the meantime Henny has fallen in love with a much younger man. He lives abroad and they have long phone calls everyday. She tells me that they are soul mates. Now they are hoping to share their future together and Henny is starting to fantasize about mariage.

In November (2021) Henny and I were finally reunited and I photographed Henny wearing her "secret wedding dress." No one can know that she bought it. It will simply seem "too crazy."

She has been married twice before, this being the first time wearing white. ´If´ it happens, as she says.

I will be following Henny during this love affair, capturing her new present.