I met Anniek Beije in Paris, and it did that thing that only happens in real life: the work stopped being something I admired on a screen and became something I could stand in front of, quietly, with my hands in my pockets, letting it hit me at its own pace.
I’ve been following Anniek for a long time. But meeting photographers live is always the real context. You understand the influence differently when you see how someone moves through a room, how they speak about what they do, and how much their art already says for them. In Anniek’s case, the art speaks clearly, but the person matches it with that rare combination of energy and kindness. No performance, no noise. Just a calm intensity that makes you want to pay attention.
On the wall, there were her emulsions. Originals. And I was genuinely happy to see them there, not because “a picture looks better printed” (we all know that), but because her pieces carry time in a way that feels almost physical. The surface isn’t just a surface. It’s evidence. Each layer feels like a decision, a risk, a small surrender to what the material wants to do. Emulsion work is never a shortcut. It’s a craft with consequences. It asks for patience, for precision, and for accepting the parts that refuse to be controlled.
That’s the thing I admire in Anniek: dedication that doesn’t need to announce itself. You can sense the hours behind each piece, the repetition, the care, the refusal to rush. Instant photography is often treated as a quick thrill, an object that appears and gets consumed fast. But in her hands, it becomes the opposite. It becomes a slow language built from fragile matter. Something you can’t scroll past.
We talked in Paris, and I left that conversation with the feeling that her work isn’t trying to “show” anything in a literal way. It’s doing something more honest: it makes space. It makes room for what usually stays hidden, not through explanation, but through presence. And that, to me, is where art starts going beyond both the human side and the artistic side.
Because at a certain level, the work is no longer just a mirror of the person. It becomes its own force. It holds a kind of clarity that’s hard to fake and impossible to manufacture. It doesn’t shout. It illuminates.
And sometimes that’s what we’re really looking for from art, whether we admit it or not: not answers, not statements, not “content”… but light.