I look for light.
Always.

Not the dramatic kind, not the heavy or dark but the soft light, the kind that slips in quietly. A reflection, a shimmer, a small opening. My eye goes there instinctively. Light feels like hope. It lifts.

As a photographer, I try to be unobtrusive. I don’t want to disturb what’s already there. I want to disappear, and at the same time leave something behind. That tension between being unseen and being noticed runs through everything I make.

I am a philosophical person, a thinker, a writer. Photography comes and goes in my life, changing its form each time it returns. Sometimes it is inward, sometimes outward. Sometimes it is art, sometimes reportage, sometimes self-reflection.

I have been making self-portraits since my late teenage years. They are a form of self-reflection, a long search for who I am. I am still in that search, still making portraits — though less than before. I think, I am getting closer to who I am.

For years I worked as a reportage photographer for de Volkskrant. I found my own stories, followed my own curiosity, and brought them back through images. Meeting people, entering their lives, and standing in unfamiliar places expanded my world. When I travel, when I move through cities, I don’t set out to make images. I stumble upon them, notice them, and in that moment I make them. I’m ready when they appear.

Light always does.

Nilla Berretty-van Loenen 
01/10/1989