I first used a hydraulic platform to take photographs when working on my Playground series in 2011. I’d been trying to capture training sessions atthe facilities in the Netherlands where members of the fire brigade, police and Ministry of Defence are put through their paces. Initially I was balanced on a stepladder. But when I sent through some of the pictures, I was told they worked aesthetically but lacked a sense of where these ghost towns actually were – away from civilisation. To achieve that, I knew I was going to have to get higher.
As the camera I was using was bulky and expensive, I didn’t want to risk attaching it to a drone. Besides, drones attract attention. A cherry picker offered the perfect solution, allowing me to shoot securely from much greater heights. I’ve been using them for my high-perspective work ever since. Some of the people from the company I rent the equipment from now follow me on Instagram. They always get it squeaky clean for me, because they know I’m one of the few clients who will bring it back in the same condition.
This picture, taken 10 years ago, is part of my Park series. In the Netherlands, we’re quite cramped for space, meaning the parks in Amsterdam and Rotterdam are used pretty much as people’s back yards, gathering points for city-dwellers. Terrible things are going on in the world, but here is proof that within Amsterdam, a vibrant city full of people from all over the world, we can coexist peacefully next to each other.
I’d visit each park on my bike first, to work out my shooting position, check for solid ground for the crane, and work out where the sun was going to be throughout the day. The season, the weather conditions, everything had to be taken into account – it’s quite mathematical. When it comes to actually setting up, I don’t get permission first. In the Netherlands, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness afterwards than to ask for a permit beforehand. I would just turn up with the cherrypicker wearing an orange vest and a white helmet – I’ve found the brighter you dress, the less visible you are. If people do ask questions, I usually say: “I’m making a 3D scan.” It’s a boring answer that helps deflect attention.
This is Westerpark. What you can’t see is that there’s a huge festival going on behind the fence to the left, which made it even easier to work without anyone bothering me. Because the landscape, for me, is as important as the people in it, I always try to make sure the people are equally divided around the frame, to balance the image. Once I did ask a family: “Would you mind going a little bit over there?” But then they constantly looked at my camera, so that’s not something I do any more.
As a kid, I was dragged to museums and galleries by my parents, which I’m now very grateful to them for. The way 17th-century Dutch masters painted light ended up influencing my work. Sometimes, on a cloudy day, I’ll wait an hour and a half for a beam of light to burst through, as if the sun is painting on the landscape. When everything comes together, it’s like one symphony orchestra, with all the elements working together.
I become very focused and will wait as long as it takes. When I was shooting Playground, I’d sometimes be working in the snow. People from the army would be calling up: “Please come down. You’ve been up there for nearly five hours, you must be freezing.” The height I shoot at depends on the subject. For the Park series I wanted to give a sense of what people were doing, so I worked between 10 and 15 metres up. In some instances, I’m 20 metres up, because I want the figures to show the scale of the landscape. Above 15 metres, I can barely hear people below. It feels like I can reach out and grab birds flying by. I move around in an “in between” layer, a kind of a divine perspective. It can get lonely, though. I always say: “When I start talking to myself, I have to go home.”
• This image is part of Human.Kind, a group exhibition at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva until 14 April, in collaboration with Prix Pictet.
Jeroen Hofman’s CV
Born: 1976, Brabant, the Netherlands.
Trained: The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, graduated in 2002.
Influences: Edward Burtynsky, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky.
High point: “My first big solo exhibition in The Hague’s Photography Museum in 2022.”
Low point: “I am a fanatical snowboarder and got stuck in a glacial crevasse in Austria. The mountain rescue service got me out.”
Top tip: “This advice from Nadav Kander back in 2013: ‘Never try to be someone else.’”
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