Bas Princen
icon 034 | April 2006

Bas Princen’s photographs seem to give the urban landscape a sense of order that is independent from man, and a life in which people are merely incidental or hapless participants. Princen, who trained as an architect, sees the pictures as constructing rather than recording space. “I try to find images with a spatial quality that you can only see as a designer,” he says. “I try to make space with my camera.” His method finds a tension between man and his environment, and sometimes a sense that the city and the landscape have merged. The following selection is from a series Princen made last year while he was a MAK-Schindler artist in residence in Los Angeles. In one photograph a mirrored office tower seems to be transparent. In another, a building looms almost imperceptibly in the background so that you feel its presence before you see it. These are spaces that, as Princen puts it, “can only exist in a camera”.