Roadsides full of pink willowherbs and cooking hotdogs over an open fire.
My BIO
I am Anna and I work as a photographer and journalist for various magazines, creating stories in images and words. My work always has a rural touch to it.
And because of my love for cooking and seasonal homegrown organic food, I also create culinary features from start to finish, developing recipes, cooking, styling and photographing all dishes myself.
My base is our beautiful farmhouse where I grow my own vegetables, keep chickens, dogs and gypsy horses, and where I spend a lot of time outside and in my farmhouse kitchen. From our rural home I travel to find stories, either close by or further away, but always in the country, England being my favourite destination where I feel very much at home.
Ever since I graduated from the renowned ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem (Netherlands) years ago, I’ve been working as a creative professional. I worked as a freelance designer and graphic designer for various international fashion brands like O’Neill Europe and Tommy Hilfiger amongst many others. When traveling the world for my work in the fashion industry, on often extensive trips, I always took my camera and every spare moment I spend wondering around sketching what I saw, with my camera as a sketchbook. In the meantime, I studied photography at the Academy for Photography in Amsterdam giving me all the tools necessary to create the story I want to tell. That story was clear to me from a very young age.
Growing up in the country I spend a lot of time outside as a child. We had a big kitchen garden, an orchard and two ponies. From a young age I had a small vegetable garden myself where I grew lettuces, chives, carrots and strawberries. Cooking also was part of my life from a very young age. I loved watching my mother in the kitchen, standing on a small chair so I got to see everything she did. I started cooking myself from a very young age too, apple pies, cakes and pasta were family favourites although I sometimes drove my mother insane. And I loved drawing and painting and simply making stuff, and writing stories.
When I was 7 years old, I went on my first big adventure. My grandparents took me on a 6 weeklong trip, traveling around Norway in their small caravan. We travelled the Nordic country roads in the summer sun, with roadsides full of pink willowherbs and cooking hotdogs over an open fire. My parents had bought me a small camera to take with me. To me the link between travel and photography was born.
Nothing much has changed essentially.
Now I work with several magazines as a photographer, journalist and I am developing of culinary series too, having done a lot of work for Seasons Magazine (Netherlands) over the past years, and several other magazines in the Netherlands, UK and Sweden. You can find a selection of my publications here:
I currently work on 2 books including stories and recipes and I am working on a series of fine art prints.
A Set of Sketches
Using my camera as a sketchbook, I travel remote country lanes to tell stories of faraway tales, gathering components like pencil drawn sketches.
I capture the smell of nettles in the spring rain, the sound of the skylarks high above the fields and the taste of freshly picked peas from a kitchen garden. The feeling of cooking over an open fire in the farmyard while watching the wild ponies dance in the summer grass and having purple stained hands from picking blackberries ripened in the late summer sun.
My work is always sketch-like, driven by feeling, in images, words and in my cooking. I capture what I see, but more importantly, what I feel, the soul of a landscape, the natural world, the lives woven within it and the food that is shared.
I pass on the tales told at a farmhouse kitchen table and those shared by the shepherd working high in the hills with his five dogs. I tell the stories of the small farm-to-table farmers working the land in regenerative ways, and the stories of artisans passing down their skills through generations of hands-on crafts. And I tell the story of the seasons through cooking, inspired by the land.
My technique is pure and natural; the subjects and light follow the rhythm of nature. Each image and each sentence is a sketch; nothing has to be perfect, if it captures the essence of the moment, and tells the story I want to tell. My camera is simply a tool, my sketchbook to tell the story.
My journeys always lead me back to my own farm, where images, words, and cooking come together. Growing vegetables and keeping animals flow naturally into my creative process. The rhythm of the seasons and quiet moments on the land inspire everything I do, from photography and writing to the seasonal food I cook inspired by my travels and the kitchen garden on my farm.
Through my work, I hope to reconnect people to the wild freedom within the soul of the land and its unfolding stories. Stories told whispered by the land, in weathered hands and shared meals, like a set of sketches.