Together my wife and our two little kids, we lived in the wilderness of British Columbia, Canada, near the coastal mountain range, for some years. A place without grocery stores, electricity, phone, television or neighbors. Weeks would pass without seeing anyone. To get to the nearest town, we drove three hours one way through mud, snow or ice.
I photographed other people who spent lots of time in their vehicles. A Native family from a first nations reserve going to town on Friday. A priest giving a sermon in a small church in a remote valley. A couple who couldn’t afford the rent of their apartment anymore and were now actually living in their car. A guy traveling to see his sick brother on the other side of the continent.
The time spent waiting interests me, the void between point of departure and destination. It’s almost as if the microcosmos inside the vehicles exists independent from our normal, linear concept of the passage of time. In TRANSVOID I regard the vehicles as solitary domains in time and space.
TRANSVOID was awarded first prize for Fine Art/Portraiture at the Sony World Photography Awards in Cannes in March 2009 and the first prize for poraiture/stories at the World Press Photo 2010.
Photographs of this series have been part of several exhibitions: “A Positive View” in Somerset House in London, March 2010 (with Richard Avedon, Henry Cartier Bresson, Wim Wenders, and many others). In 2009/,2010 there have been large solo exhibitions of my work at the Stedelijk Museum ‘s-Hertogenbosch, NL, and the CBK, ’s-Hertogenbosch, NL, featuring large scale prints (320 x 400 cm) of the TRANSVOID series. These works have also been part of the Thessaloniki Photo Biennial in 2010/2011 and Global Photography/Occupancy at Sifest, Savignano, Italy; and in numerous other group exhibitions at many places in Tokyo, London, Paris, New York, Cannes, Toronto, etc.
I live in Chile, South America, where I work on TRANSVOID and several new series and the movie project DOMAIN with Kine Imagenes.