in Veragua

Inspired by the despatches Columbus sent to the Spanish Crown, I explored a stretch of the Caribbean coast and registered from my point of view the expressive force of man and nature in that region.

On his first three journeys to the New World, Columbus plotted a whole series of Caribbean islands. During his fourth journey in 1502, he landed on ‘Terra Firma’ and charted the coastline from Cabo Gracias A Dios in actual Honduras to the Rio Belen in present Panama. Halfway, in what we now know as Costa Rica, he named the region Veragua.

Veragua is most probably a corruption of the answer the admiral got on his request to show him the shortest way to the local goldmines. After all, that was why he was there for.

Although he describes in his despatch to the Catholic Monarchs of Spain the richness of the mines, he only saw them in his fantasy. In the same way, he expected to encounter the Ganges behind every bend in the landscape. This was India, wasn’t it?

I like it to let me inspire by literary descriptions of places and than to go there to see for myself. In his despatches Columbus sketched a vision of a place he called Veragua. By going to Costa Rica and photographing the Caribbean coast from my point of view, I produce in the same way a vision of a place that we can call the Veragua of today.

As a documentary photographer I visit places in the same way a baker bakes his bread. He bakes it because we do not - we buy it from him. So I go somewhere because you do not. I go there to watch the world, to capture the moment and to share it with you. “Look, that is what I have seen!”

But there is absolutely no objectivity involved. In my eyes photography is about imagining. I produce no factual documentation, but images. And it is up to the viewer to become a reader of a visual narrative.

I make my photos in the public space and try to avoid to intervene in the situation. My main choices are made in the post-production. Selection and sequencing are for me the most important parts of the proces. The story grows and becomes a train ride through a landscape.