My favourite visiting speaker that we had this year was
Thijs Wassink who came in to tell us about his career. Before he did his talk
he came into our session with Adrian when we were showing our book dummies for
feedback for the Printed page module. I was put into Thijs’ group and gave him
my book to look at. I explained my concept to him and he seemed very interested
in what I had to say. He looked through my images and took them all out of the
folder to see different sequences and gave me advice on what to do next. He
advised me to use more images with more content in them and said that I had a
lot of singular objects so the balance needed to be right. I took this on board
and later added different images. He was very easy to talk to and wasn’t scary
as some people had told me he was.
When Thijs did his talk it was very inspiring as he told how
him and his friend Ruben Lundgren from University decided to work together when
they left and make images together. It is a strange partnership as Thijs lives
in London and Ruben lives in Beijing but they work together and speak on the
phone and Skype all the time and share everything. He said this works well for
them both as they can be in two places at once. It was good to hear that he had
so many rejection letters from the people he sent his photographs to but kept
sending and sending until someone wanted to use their images. He showed great
determination and was confident in the work he had produced. He talked us
through different projects and brought in books that he has had published. I
liked the Tokyo Tokyo book where he and Ruben both took a photograph at the
exact same time of people in Tokyo but from different angles. The images looked
so different even though they were of the same person which was interesting.
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