'At the time, it was important to me that the photograph shown here be characteristic of my work, contemporary, and of high quality. This is that photograph. It conveys what I am about: locations, atmosphere, people, the studio... Making things look good...
The photograph had been made the previous summer for the Rotterdam advertising agency ARA as part of a Sphinx campaign for bathrooms and sanitary ware, themed ‘my domain.’ You see the hectic world and people rushing around, contrasted with the calm of your bathroom—a private part of your home, a place where you feel at ease.
The image consists of three parts. The first photograph—which is itself composed of five or six images—shows the metro station at Amsterdam Central Station, where I spent three hours photographing from exactly the same viewpoint. While shooting, I kept the dimensions of the bathroom in mind. We then built the bathroom in the studio and photographed it against a gray background, again placing the camera on a tripod at precisely the same distance, with the same lens and perspective. The third image is a computer-generated glass cube, including reflections of its surroundings.
Incidentally, that cube was inspired by the Apple Store on 5th Avenue in New York. It's a fantastic, highly unusual building: a granite plaza with a glass cube suddenly rising from it and a staircase inside leading down to the store below. In any event, these three images were all combined in Photoshop to produce the final result.
Although I outsourced the 3D component—and therefore part of the manipulation—it remains my concept, my photograph. What do I like about it? It was a difficult assignment: an atmospheric image that still showed the product to its best advantage. Just figuring out how to approach it... It worked. The result is a powerful photograph.'
Name: Vincent Kruijt (1960)
Based in: Amsterdam
Info: www.vincentkruijt.nl
