“Blue Mood (Al Mar)” by Photographer Sander Coers

Share a challenging moment you’ve experienced in your artistic journey.

I was supposed to graduate during the peak of Covid, which was quite a difficult time. I felt a real sense of disconnection to people, and since my work focuses on people’s stories in a very intimate and personal way, I just felt stuck. I decided to postpone my graduation for half a year and traveled to Tarragona, Spain, to visit my cousin Jens and his parents, who lived there. Eventually, I would create most of my graduation series “Come Home” there, a visual essay that delves into the complexities of the adolescent masculine landscape. I self-published “Come Home,” and it gained a lot of attention in The Netherlands and abroad, which gave me a huge boost of self-confidence to keep working on my photography.

Can you speak a bit about the body of work you chose to submit – What was your thought process or selection process like?

The series started in 2021 and is a sequel to “Come Home”; it features the same cast of characters made up from my friends and family members. It consists of images shot in different places around the world, all significant to the childhood memories of the characters. The idea to make the series into a book came quite early into the process, so that also affected the creation of it, I think. Most images refer to each other in one way or another.

The visual language used in “Blue Mood (Al Mar)” is reminiscent of nostalgic photographs found in family photo albums. My aim was to transport the viewer into a vivid fever dream with saturated colors and warm hues based on these fleeting memories that I kept reliving in my mind. In the selection process, I started noticing a color palette that would refer to these memories so selecting based on colors became a huge part of the sequencing.

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