About AETHER RELIC
I don't photograph the world as it is.
I photograph it as I see it.
Photography gives me something that's increasingly hard to find: silence.
The moment I look through the viewfinder, the rest disappears. No stress. No noise. No distractions. Just me, the camera and the frame in front of me.
I can walk down a street with my wife and suddenly stop. I can feel her looking at me, probably wondering what the hell has he seen now?
Usually, it's something small.
A line. A reflection. Symmetry in a place where nobody is looking for it. Light falling across concrete. A detail hidden inside something much bigger.
I like emptiness that still contains a lot.
And I've never been particularly interested in looking only where I'm supposed to look. Sometimes the interesting photograph isn't in front of you. It's above you. Below you. Behind you.
Maybe that's just stubbornness.
I'm okay with that.
01
It started with a purple flower.
I was around fifteen when I won a camera at a fair.
Nothing fancy. No zoom. No settings. Put a roll of film in it and start shooting.
I can still remember the first photograph I took: a purple flower in my parents' backyard.
I hope I still have it somewhere.
Photography stayed with me after that. Disposable cameras came and went, until a visit to the Dutch Air Force Days changed things. Everywhere around me were people with cameras and enormous lenses.
Not long after, I bought my first real SLR: a Sigma.
At the Air Force Days I went crazy with it. Roll after roll disappeared into that camera, trying to catch aircraft screaming past at ridiculous speeds.
Life got busier. School, work, everything that comes with growing up. But the camera never really disappeared. It came with me on holidays, into forests, to zoos and eventually around the world.
02
Then came Berlin.
Berlin changed the way I look.
Berlin changed much more for me than photography.
It's a city where people can be themselves. Different people, cultures, architecture and histories exist next to each other without needing to become the same.
Old and new. Beautiful and rough. War and progress. Concrete, glass, decay, colour and life.
And photographically, Berlin is ridiculous.
There seems to be a photograph waiting on every corner.
It taught me to look differently. Not necessarily at the obvious subject, but at what's happening around it. A tiny detail of an enormous building can interest me more than the building itself.
That's probably the closest thing I have to a photographic style.
A little stubborn. Different when possible. And always curious about what happens when you stop looking straight ahead.
03
Why AETHER RELIC?
AETHER RELIC is where I want to share that way of looking.
Not because I think I'm the best photographer. I'm not. And I have absolutely no ambition to become the best.
If somebody calls me an artist, I'll probably feel uncomfortable and laugh it off.
I make photographs because I love making them.
Photography, to me, is about doing, learning and reflecting. It's about being able to disappear into my own little bubble and create something exactly as I see and feel it at that moment.
Would it be incredible to sell a hundred limited prints one day? Of course.
Would I love to see my work in a major international exhibition? Hell yes.
But neither is the reason I do this.
The goal is much simpler:
to keep doing something I love, in a way that allows me to be completely myself.
If somebody sees one of my photographs and thinks, “Damn, I've never looked at it that way before. I want to try that,” then AETHER RELIC has done something worthwhile.
04
Moments Become Relics.
A relic can be almost anything.
The first photograph of a purple flower.
An F-16 screaming past at ridiculous speed, captured perfectly in a fraction of a second.
Or an intimate selfie with my wife that means absolutely nothing to the rest of the world and everything to me.
The technical quality isn't what turns a photograph into a relic.
Emotion does.
And emotion is something you don't forget.
Maybe that's ultimately why I photograph.
I hope that, many years from now, my wife and I can sit together and look through decades of photographs. That I'll find an image I'd completely forgotten about.
And I hope it hits me.
I hope the memories come flooding back. I hope there are tears. And I hope I can look at everything I've made and feel incredibly fortunate that I got to see, experience and photograph all of it.
Because eventually, photographs become more than photographs.
Moments become relics.
Michel van Amelsvoord
Photographer · Filmmaker · Creator