Landscape Stories: What poetry or artist influenced your beginnings most? Where can the roots of your work be found? Jan Kempenaers: I started my studies in the mid-80s at The Royal Academy in Ghent, where I’m now teaching and doing research. At that time, the photography department was really into Henri Cartier Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. I wasn’t so keen on it, it was frustrating because I always had the idea that you have missed out on the best moments in these photographs.
I was looking for something else in the first year of the studies. In the library, I discovered two books by Robert Adams – From The Missouri West and Los Angeles Spring, and also a book by Lewis Baltz called Park City. I was looking to these photographers around ‘86. After that I started making photographs in which you could see several functions in the landscape, often with strange combinations between the things you could identify, like roads, industry and housing.
Landscape Stories: How much have the New Topographics movement and Land Art been a source of inspiration for you when you started to search for your photographic style? Jan Kempenaers: Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz are definitely two artists from the New Topographics period. I saw the book on the New Topographics in the mid-80s and the photographs from the show in ’75. During this time John Davies’ book Green and Pleasant Land also appealed to me. Land Art was not really the thing that grabbed my attention.
Landscape Stories: Do you gather specific information about what you are going to photograph? Do you already have an idea about the photo project when you start the journey? How important is your preparatory work? Jan Kempenaers: It depends a bit on the project. If I think about the Spomenik project then its important to prepare an itinerary and gather information about it. You have to know that the monuments are there and more or less where they are. In this case, it is difficult to make photographs without knowing where or what to find.
For landscape photography in general, I think travelling is important – just travelling around and seeing what appears in your way. Not with the fixed idea of what you will photograph but more from the idea of registering what’s happening around you – using intuition more than knowing what you want to find.
Landscape Stories: How does the project evolve from when you start shooting? How do you choose the places you photograph? Jan Kempenaers:Firstly, it is important to look at the place to see if it’s an interesting subject. When I find a subject I can already imagine what the image is going to look like, so it’s often based on the experience of finding the subject within the landscape. The duration of the project also depends on the subject itself – sometimes I find an interesting subject, and think that it might be nice to make more photos of the same – a series can develop in the process. In other instances I look for similar subjects that can make a series of photographs afterwards. With the Spomenik project it’s something completely different. This happened to me in Ireland, Scotland and New Zealand. You really have to be focused, otherwise it can be difficult. It’s like this for me here in Belgium – it is important that I have the experience of a landscape for the first time, otherwise I become too familiar with it and can’t see the image anymore. It’s impossible if you’ve seen it 100 times already. That’s why traveling is so important – you always encounter new things one after the other.
