Bastiaan van Aarle lives in Mortsel and teaches photography at d’Academie Beeld Sint-Niklaas. In his work he explores the boundaries of photography, the medium-specific properties and how they relate to the perception of reality. Such as the effect of light through time, the transformation of invasive advertising panels into self-destructive non-places or, as in Moving Mountains, the movement of the planet through time and space. He experiments with different photographic techniques, adds external elements to the image or combines different images into a new whole.

Mouving Mountains – 2023

Bastiaan van Aarle challenges our notion of time and movement. Unexpectedly, by choosing a medium and a subject that epitomizes stillness. By taking photos of mountains—all within the same frame, but spread over a certain period of time—these monuments of immutability, seemingly start to shift and reveal a movement, we don’t experience ourselves: the rotation of the planet in space. Taking inspiration from color photography’s beginnings, van Aarle transferred the different images to cyan, magenta, yellow and black. When brought together again, they reveal subtle traces of the passing of time in colored tinges. The effect is so otherworldly that it feels as if the rocks exist in a different dimension—as if the soft hues come fuming from the mountain’s deepest history, floating gently in the thin mountain air. What is revealed here about the world is only exposed in the image, it can neither be conceived beforehand nor be seen with the mere eye: It is the magic of photography.