Isabella Rozendaal is a  photographer curently living in Amsterdam. Working both on commissioned and autonomous projects. For more go here

-interview after the jump-

On your website it reads:

“Other interests include cowboys, pork, sweaty concerts, sunsets, and fruit.”

People often describe interests in one word, or ready-made punch line like sentences. Could you elaborate a bit more on these interests?

I am very much intrigued by rural lifestyle, the US, rugged men, horses, animals, old country music and western movies. I guess cowboys just embody all of that. Plus they’re super sexy. What’s not to love? I’m working on a project about hunters at the moment, which will go on for at least a few years, and I’ll be very excited to embark on the US chapter of it.

I am obsessed with all things food, as you can see on my blog, and pork, to me, is the most magical of all meats. The taste of bacon goes insanely well with nearly anything, and the combination of pork and beans is divine to me. It’s humble, hearty peasant food, I could eat it everyday. The smell of melting pork fat and caramelizing onions drives me crazy. I think beef is much more boring and pretentious. Pork would be the hardest meat for me to live without. Sausage would be missed. Fruit is at the other end of the food spectrum, super healthy, fresh and delicious. You can indulge without feeling guilty. It even goes well with pork. I guess I’m saying I love pork, fruit and everything in between.

I tend to have the best time at the parties where all my friends get together in a tiny, overheated space that’s not too well suited for such occasions, some of my friend’s bands perform and everyone ends up either on the floor or with their shirts off, dancing to stupid music and/or breaking things. They are much better than the pretentious hip hop nights where everyone is afraid to get their sneakers dirty. I just really enjoy it when people don’t give a crap and let their inhibitions go.

Although I like things that are nasty, ugly and dirty, or complex and evolved, I also very much enjoy classic, kitschy, one dimensional beauty. Things as pretty as sunsets. I love nature and I can never resist photographing a colored sky, even if I end up never using it.

You’ve seen quiet some places in the world, even studied and lived abroad why live in Amsterdam?

I live in Amsterdam because it’s easy. After school I started building up a network here. I’m just starting to reap the fruits of that labor. To start over elsewhere would be hard. Also, I love my friends and family here, I would miss them terribly if I left. I like traveling so much, and I’m glad I get to do it all the time, but I also love coming home to the people here. Living in Amsterdam is relatively cheap and that makes it possible for me to invest a lot of my income into my projects and travel. That is very important to me. However, I’m not saying I wouldn’t give it a try sometime in the future. No plans for that yet, though.

If you had to criticize your own work, what would you say?

Well, I like my work, I make it the way I think it should be made. Actually, the documentary projects I do by myself, I stand behind 100%. But I guess my biggest criticism about my work is that I find it difficult to make something that I feel is just as powerful when I’m doing it for someone else. My biggest shortcoming, I think, is that I am a terrible director. I’m more of a collector of images than a creator of one. I look up interesting people and situations, and take – I’d like to think – interesting pictures of them. I don’t really add anything and it doesn’t take up much time once I’m there. It’s all in the casting and selecting. However, if someone asks me to take a picture of someone that I don’t find interesting at all, I have a very hard time making an interesting image out of it. Some photographers are very good at being creative with that, I’m not one of them.

Autonomous Artist tend to not communicate their commissioned work so much, with in photography this tendency seems to be less. Do you agree? If so what could be the cause of this?

I do agree with that, and I’m not sure why that’s the case but I’m glad it is. Personally I try not to think about those boundaries too much and just make as much self commissioned work as I can, and hope that when people want to pay me to shoot something, they want something that kind of goes with that, that has my interest. I’ll shoot damn near anything someone will pay me for, so I have money to spend on my projects. This doesn’t really answer your question, I guess, it’s a tough one. I don’t really know.

Fetishes.. you have any??

In the non-erotic sense of the word, that would definitely be food.

Analogue and digital. What do you think about it, how will it go in the future?

Everything will ofcourse be digital. Analogue photography will still exist but as an arts and crafts, hobby type thing that’s interesting for the charm of it. Some artists will still use it as a medium, just as they use lithography, gum bichromate or silk screen printing, and that is fine. But the standard will obviously be digital, it mostly already is. I’m glad the analogue/digital discussion has sort of passed, I always got so tired of talking to people who resist progress out of pure stubbornness. It happens every time a new medium appears. What frustrated a lot of photographers, I think, is that they used to feel special because they possessed special skills and techniques that were hard to master. Now anyone with a digital SLR and a speedlite flash can be a photographer and they are not so special anymore. Now we have to discern ourselves through our content, which is much harder. However, I do feel that it is good to experiment with a lot of different media, and they all definitely have their charm.

Can you give an inside in your working process? How does an idea evolve into a project.

My ideas start out as very simple one-word or one-sentence concepts. ‘How the Dutch love their animals’, ‘The Dutch on vacation’, or ‘Recreational hunters around the world’. In my head I will start to picture interesting pictures or situations that I’d want to shoot, and if the subject is interesting enough, I won’t be able to stop it. I will fantasize about it incessantly and I want to do it so badly it hurts. So I start researching. I talk about it so much that people around me get annoyed, read about it and google it to death. And then very organically I will start to grow a selection of places I want to visit and shoot. And then, as soon as the funding is there, I’ll just do it. This is all the easy part of the project, that very much happens on its own. The hard part, after shooting thousands and thousands of pictures, is the selection process. That’s a big headache. What I also like to do, is reseach the background of it very thoroughly. For the animal project, I wrote an accompanying thesis about the way we view and experience animals, and how that comes across in pop culture and art. This gave me a much clearer understanding of the subject matter and made me connect with the project much more strongly. For the hunting project I will also write, I intend to make a book that is part image, part text.

You and your brother were once described as equally talented, yet your way of working is very different, your reflection please.

Well, that is just a matter of opinion, I guess. I’m flattered because I like his work very much. But of course, our work can’t really be compared in any way. Perhaps it would be nice to look back and see if there are any visible connections by the time we’re in our eighties. If there is anything at all similar I would have to say that we both work very intuitively. Although, any artist does that, really, so I might not have a point there at all.