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For many people photography is an a priori, like a language one happens to speak. But this is too one-dimensional. I think photographers who take their medium for granted are overlooking something, an intriguing false bottom. Artists who consciously choose to use photography are more aware that in dealing with photography, one has to deal with certain preconditions. For one thing, it always refers to its own nature. It is the meta-medium par excellence. There also is an ethical dimension: the depiction of certain things is not necessarily exempt from morals. That is why I think the use of photography warrants a certain hesitance and care.

AK: You mentioned that you are “formerly a photographer” – do you still make photographs?

NvD: Yes I do, I always have. But in the past years I have felt much more comfortable seeing myself as an amateur. I am now at a point where I can look back and reassess some of the things I did. For the first time I feel like I could make a very strict selection of images and publish them. But I wouldn’t do that without contextualizing through writing and choosing the right platform.

AK: Coincidentally I spent yesterday afternoon interviewing a few of the original New Topographics photographers – Frank Gohlke, John Schott, and Henry Wessel – and they remarked that they wanted to make photographs precisely instead of writing because they wanted to say things that couldn’t be put into words. I think part of what they were saying is that writing can potentially be too demonstrative. This is not to take away from the inherent abstractness of language, but just to say that there is a way in which a photograph can be open to interpretation despite its specificity.

NvD: New Topographics is very dear and relevant to me. I can relate to their choice of photography instead of writing. I am also most intrigued by those photographs that I am not able to explain verbally. But words can also express things photography cannot. Photography and writing are not interchangeable. They need each other. I think conceptual photography, like that of the New Topographics, requires a verbal contextualization, if not a semantic system that is dependent on words. Similarly, I believe my writings presuppose the existence of images. I would not be able to write without photography.

In saying this, I want to make a clear distinction between writing as information and writing as art. It would be a mistake to consider New Topographics photographs as information, though for a photography illiterate that may be tempting. The same thing can be said about writing. At first glance – a photographer’s glance perhaps – writing may seem demonstrative and descriptive, but I think there also is a more evocative potential.

In this respect I would like to mention Werner Herzog’s adage of “ecstatic truth”. His “documentaries” often contain staged scenes, because he is looking for a deeper layer in reality. Sticking to reality, he says, can only lead to a “bookkeeper’s truth”. I find this inspiring, because he proposes something that exceeds reality, that can actually introduce something new to reality. I think this is exactly the responsibility of art, as opposed to, for instance, journalism. So art is not information.

AK: I also think there is a real danger in photography for language to be used as a kind of buttress or explanatory support. W. G. Sebald is an author that photographers were really talking about a few years ago, and I think it’s because he successfully managed to integrate photography into his narratives without it becoming illustrative. You mentioned that there has been a transition in your mode of inquiry from the time that you wrote “The Grand Absence,” which seems bound up in the experience of going through graduate school and wrestling with questions of interpretation, reception, and depiction, whereas in Plateau, you seem much more concerned with this idea of “evocation.” The full title of “The Grand Absence” is “The Grand Absence: A Visualization.” Can you talk about the distinction you are making between “evocation” and “visualization?”

NvD: The Grand Absence had to do with my emancipation from photography. To a certain degree, the quality of my writing was still dependent on criteria that applied to photography. It was like determining the “replacement value” of photography in front of an insurance company run by fervent photographers. The following years, writing gradually broke away from just being non-photographic. It became autonomous. My stories became more personally motivated and started to involve topics that occupied me, like historical events and man’s relation to nature. Speaking of my relation to New Topographics...

I began to write more fiction. Fiction involved the creation of characters, settings, events to give a concrete significance to abstract concepts I was busy with. Like the duality of perception; how our view of the world revolves around seemingly opposed poles. Objectivity and subjectivity, mechanical and human observation, the natural and man-made, science and art, reality and meaning. These matters interest me from the viewpoint of my characters.

The two characters in Plateau are polar researchers, dropped onto the Arctic pack ice in the late sixties. This was long before the introduction of Google Earth, when the mapping of the world still had a connotation of painstaking knowledge-gathering and espionage. It was a different age, almost unimaginable now. But looking through the eyes of these characters, our world might be equally incredible.

So in answer to your question, Plateau is not merely a visualization, in terms of being a replacement for something visual. It is evocative in the sense that it implies the invention of things that lie outside the realm of the visible. Things that cannot be visualized, in other words.

I have ongoing collaborations with visual artists to investigate the working of this third layer. I work together with photographers on book projects where documentary photography is placed next to a fictional story in order to create a parallel reality. It is very important that both of these ingredients function autonomously – a mere catalogue text, for example, wouldn’t work.

I also collaborate very closely with my partner, visual artist Gwenneth Boelens, under the name ‘Il faut’. I have written monologues for her art works and she has provided images for publications of mine, but essentially all our work goes through a filter of mutual agreement and conceptualization. This summer we recorded material for a new film about the analogue representation of nature. That film will be an amalgamation of both our practices.

AK: In your writing there is obviously still a fetishization of photography or at least the act of making a photograph. It seems you are still holding on to, or longing for that particular physical and perceptual experience of photographing. I am thinking specifically here of the moment in Plateau when the scientist is shooting with the large format camera in the Arctic. I think this is something that most photographers could empathize with: lugging a monorail around, hiding under the dark cloth, squinting to see the upside down image, focusing, the feel of cold metal, the anxiety, and the satisfaction that comes as a result of the process.

NvD: It is certainly true that I use large format photography as a metaphor for the gaze in my stories. It is something I dwell on, because I think it is easily overlooked. I want to make a distinction between different modes of seeing. I am not talking about the fleeting glimpse, which seems to apply to snapshot photography. I am interested in photography as a way of consciously and deliberately looking at something, and blocking all other information. Like a meditation on something.

I am also interested in photography as a means to feign objectivity. This is present in the character of the woman scientist in Plateau, who wants nothing more than to mediate a reality that she finds much more important than herself. That is an aspect of photography I feel drawn towards: the mechanism taking over at the expense of the author, like an act of self-effacement. It is a sort of hiding, which in turn focuses attention on the absence of the maker.

AK: There is another passage in Plateau that stuck out to me. The moment when the woman scientist is thinking about information – that it only exists if recorded – seeing the act of recording as an “intervention.” Is this the way you also think about photography? To think of the subject of photography as information has a certain kind of classic Conceptual ring to it – that is, approaching the photograph as a mechanical record rather than within a lineage of crafted, modernist photographic concerns. And of course there is the obvious connection between “information,” words on a page, and the kind of aesthetics of administration that Benjamin Buchloh ties to Conceptualism. So when I first heard about your work I guess I was expecting it to be located somewhere in this vein, something more procedural or abrupt. However, your words seem to be more tied to fiction and narrative.

NvD: Yes, I think of photography as an “intervention”. At the moment, I am reading a book called Images In Spite Of All by Georges Didi-Huberman, which is about four pictures taken in Auschwitz, the only photographic record known to date that depicts the actual perpetration of the holocaust. The Jewish Sonderkommando who took the images, intervened both literally and figuratively in the course of events. I truly think that the fact that these images exist, alters the way we perceive history and therefore history itself. History is a mental concept that is inseparably bound to questions of perception. It doesn’t exist without our gaze. The same goes for mental concepts to understand the world, like exact sciences.