An interview with Bas Losekoot

Dutch photographer Bas Losekoot won our recent competition URBAN LIFE with a stunning freeze-frame street moment, having previously won our competition An Instant back in 2016. The image struck us, both for its arresting subject matter, and for its sublime technical execution, exhibiting a sharpness, or a ‘hyper-reality’ as Bas would put it, unusual for a street image.

Looking through the series from which that image was taken, Out of Place, each frame tells a story of the urban world that now half of the world inhabits – how it confines us, and we retract into our inner-selves in public. How the busiest places can be the loneliest. Bas accentuates these feelings with his considered compositions, where negative space heightens the feelings of isolation and introspection, and where looming shadows are often more prominent than the people. With the recent global pandemic, they are all the more powerful and relevant.

We sat down with Bas to ask him about his ideas behind Out of Place, and his techniques for capturing them. His answers are insightful and thought-provoking.

Hi Bas. Firstly, congratulations on winning our Urban Life competition– winning Life Framer for a second time, five years on from your first win, and with an image from your same mega-project “Out of Place”. Can you tell us a little more about the image and the series it comes from?

In 2011, I started a project towards the beginning of the Urban Millennium; the historic turning point where for the first time more people lived in cities than in rural areas. For me this fact was the starting point for thinking about how this growing population density is influencing the inhabitants of the world’s megacities.

At the moment, we are facing the biggest wave of urbanization in human history. In this project, I try to imagine the consequences for everyday city-life in the future. I consider the city to be the centre of globalised society and with this project, I research how this reflects on its residents. What happens when too many people live on a small surface? How do people react to each other in areas of overpopulation? To me street life is a continuous stream of split-second meetings.

This specific image is shot in Lagos, Nigeria. This city forced me really to re-think my methods. You cannot go out and just shoot wherever you like, so I had to get creative in finding interesting locations to work. Sometimes unexpected elements can get juxtaposed in an extraordinary setting. Lagos Island is a very overwhelming and I fell in love with its energy and chaos immediately.

It is definitely the most difficult city I have ever worked in, yet at the same time, the most interesting. This particular photograph was made at a traffic junction close to the suburb of Ojuelegba. I was drawn to this flyover as the ceiling was completely covered with ashes because of a parked auto bus that was burnt down. I was waiting for a long time for things to happen, and suddenly those two guys walked into the frame. I remember, when I just made the shot, I was not so happy with it, because they were a bit out of focus. Later on, I realised these fast approaching blurred strangers really represent the alienation you can feel in a densely populated megacity.

URBAN LIFE: BAS’ WINNING IMAGE

Our judge, Martin Roemers, described it like a “still from a movie”. Each one is beautifully lit and composed, there’s an immaculate crispness to them that’s rare in candid street photography – they almost feel staged. Can you talk us through your process – what exactly you’re looking for in each of your images, and how you go about capturing them?

As a photographer, I am trained in a classical photo studio. Later on, I got interested in the moving image, and graduated Art school with a mixed-media installation. Later, I studied cinematography at the Dutch Film academy, while I was working as a projectionist in an old cinema in Amsterdam, where I got fascinated with the single film-frame.

On assignment, I worked for many years as a stills-photographer on film sets, where the day consists of a lot of waiting. Therefore, I had the chance to study the decoupage, mise-en-scène and especially: cinematic light. With many gaffers on set, we discussed what might be the “believability of light”.

For more than a decade, I have been interested in cities and got attracted to the images of artists that worked in the public domain. For this project, I decided to take the lights out of the photo studio, starting to imagine the street as one big studio.

Inspired by the double-light situations, created by specular windows from skyscrapers of the financial district in Manhattan; I wanted to create that uncanny reality myself. I started to use flashlights to photograph everyday street-scenes. By creating a mix, between daylight and artificial light, I was able to darken the environment and isolate certain people. First, I tried working with big lights with softboxes and generators with assistants, until I realised that wasn’t working very well. In order to work alone, I chose small compatible speedlights that I attached to traffic lights, trees and whatever I could find.

I began to imagine city dwellers as actors. By approaching the street as a stage, it made me wonder if we might perform our lives. I started to read into performativity theory, for example by the sociologist Erving Goffman – about the presentation of self in everyday life. It seems, we are performing social roles and we wear the appropriate mask for that. While commuting the city, we drop this mask and replace it for another one, the mask of ‘self-protection’. I am interested in this mask, because I believe it provides us a lot of information of the self and the construction of identity.

I use flashlights because it empowers the capacity of photography to really freeze movement. Photography already has the ability to arrest motion, through fast shutter speeds, and the flashlights really emphasize that. Through this technology, like in the stop-motion photography of Edweard Muybridge, I am able to capture something that remains unseen at the normal speed of life. Like film stills, they are a figment of a bigger picture; an extended moment out of an urban continuum. The images suggest off-screen events since they are more about what is outside than inside the frame. They make you wander what just happened or is going to happen next. They are frozen moments that feel unreal – or ‘hyper-real’ as I like to consider them. I intend to slow people down and make them dwell on the meaning of inhabiting the new reality of fast-growing cities.

There’s also an academic starting point to your work which is rare in street photography. In your series statement you talk about ideas of the evolution of man – how survival is no longer about staying alive, but now about staying in our jobs and climbing the social strata. How we no longer run from life-threatening danger but from danger of exclusion, and how the ‘modernisation’ of the world has happened at a pace too fast for us to acclimatise to, creating stress and anxiety.

What got you interested in these ideas? And what made you want to translate them into this project?

The core question when starting this project was; are we creating an ideal society by making these cities grow at such speed and to such sizes? Architect Rem Koolhaas describes the “escape to the future”, and where cities can only exist by the virtue of their own problems. I got interested in how this fast-growing urban density is influencing human behaviour. To understand modern urban life, I started to approach the city as a cage, not an urban jungle but more a human zoo. I would visit its confinements.

Later on, I referred to my work more as a forest. The buildings are the trees; the roads are the rivers. The forest is also a symbol for the overdose of stimuli we have to cope with while manoeuvring in the streets. By instinct, every impulse is processed as a one-second judgement. The forest is dense, we feel at home there, but it is also full of danger, we always have to pay attention. Just like in the natural forest, it is a survival of the fittest.

You also talk about “the anonymity of the man in the crowd” and how feelings of isolation can be more intense when a stranger finds themselves in a crowd. Ironically perhaps, you’re yet another stranger in the crowd, documenting, but not connecting with those you photograph. Or am I wrong, do you interact at all with the people you photograph? Is there a desire to?

In urban life, there is an interesting concept of public “togetherness” at play that Richard Sennett describes, as a contradiction: we dwell with the desire to belong to the group, however, at the same time, we seem to avoid contact with that group. Engagement with strangers rarely happens because of the challenges and insecurities that come with it; we could get hurt or disappointed, or we might get involved in a long conversation, that we don’t have time for. Therefore often, the stranger remains unknown.

This project is about feelings and emotions we all recognize while navigating the city. We like to be a part of a group, and yet, be an individual as well. We like to be together, but not the same. I believe, that in my images you will find people that are: “alone together”.

Next to that, I believe that the overstimulation of modern city life makes us detach from space and reality. In a sense, we all get increasingly alienated from social interaction in the streets. While commuting, we always have used many tools for avoidance practice, like eating, reading or sleeping. Nowadays we can email, text, skype, play games, watch films, shoot photos, edit, publish and send them etc. Through the use of the smartphone, we’ve brought the office into the street. The most performed act is the one of pretending to be busy. We have many screens to hide ourselves with, like sunglasses, earplugs and telephones. Whenever we are in an uncomfortable environment, we grab these devices, dramatically decreasing the chance of interacting with individuals outside of our social group.

I have an intrinsic desire to understand people better. With the use of the camera, I hope to get closer and understand them a bit more. The speed of urban life is so intense that I never have the time to talk to people when they pass by. Next to that, I do not like my presence as a photographer to influence the subject. You can see it in people’s eyes when they are aware being watched. After installing the lights, as soon I look into the viewfinder I become a fly on the wall. Sometimes I even forget that I am there. It is a disembodiment, or like Garry Winogrand has put it: the closest you can get to non-existence. This for me personally results in many accidents in traffic while photographing!

I cannot deny that I reflect the loneliness of photographing alone in the street, on the people I capture. I photograph the isolated, uncanny and even alienated people because I feel amazingly close to them. In fact, I am like them, I mean I can see myself navigating through urban space, stressed by the pressure of everyday life, like that as well. Loneliness in cities is counterintuitive mental disease number one. I never really understood how the walls of our apartments we live in can really make people isolated. There is another cosmos behind this ten centimetres, which we often never get to know.

With this project, I like to plea for a more open and communicative society. The encounter with the stranger might be an interesting opportunity or exciting friendship. To share experiences in real life rather than online, we can transform the street into a more human environment, where people look at each other rather than at their telephones. A small gesture to the stranger can mean a lot to him or her. I believe it is in these small urban encounters, where we are triggered by curiosity and can overcome our fear for the unknown; whether the stranger is the casual passer-by on the street, your neighbour or a refugee.