Do you work in the front or back garden?

Wednesday 14 September 2022, 16:16 by Elvira Smit | 2,836 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Good metaphors stick with me. Recently, I heard advertising man and artist Erik Kessels talk about front and back gardens. I don't have green fingers, but fortunately that wasn't what it was about.

In the podcast Ervaring voor beginners, Theo Maassen interviews all sorts of creators about their careers. When I saw Erik Kessels among them, I listened to that episode straight away.

Kessels has an original view of the world that inspires me to look at things differently too. He also puts amateur photography in the spotlight, scouring flea markets in search of old photographs. He then discovers trends and patterns in them.

One of his photobooks is about Ria, a woman who visited the shooting gallery at the Tilburg fair every year.

There, she literally hit the bullseye, which automatically resulted in a photograph being taken of her. Kessels collected all those photographs in a book. Here you can see some images from it.

But back to that front and back garden for a moment. What was that about?

The front garden

The front garden stands for everything the public can see. It's your website, your exhibition, your book, your installation, your published photograph, and so on. It's everything you use to present yourself to the outside world.

The back garden

The back garden, on the other hand, is the process that usually remains hidden from the public. It's hours, days, weeks and months of fiddling around. Of half-formed thoughts, of projects that start and end prematurely. It's the films you watch, the fears you have.

You turn the back garden over thoroughly. Usually, it's a complete mess, and a visitor wouldn't know what to do with it. Every now and then, something flowers in the back garden. A project takes root and rises above the rest.

That can go into the front garden. Because the front garden shows what has been curated.

By you.

That curation can only happen if there is also a back garden. For example, when you have taken a great many photographs and then dare to make choices. When you have filled scrapbooks. When you have made mistakes.

How you divide your attention

In this podcast, Kessels argues that some people pay too much attention to the front garden, and too little to the back garden.

These days, that's also much easier because you can quickly cobble together a nice website, or have one cobbled together. And with a few fun Insta filters, mediocre photographs look great.

But Kessels sees through that. They are images without a story, without an overarching idea, and therefore without a shared layer of humus in which they can take root.

They are separate from the maker, while that link with the maker is precisely what makes them so interesting. And for that, you have to turn over the back garden.

You can listen to the podcast episode with Erik Kessels here.

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