Follow the trail of the North Sea Canal, from Amsterdam to Dutch coastal city Ymuiden. Remove dust, rust and smoke and discover sparkling black diamonds on the canal banks.
Football fields full of coal ores, coffee and cocoa and silos filled with syrupy oil. Unexpected, unprecedented and never shown. The raw beauty of man and machine captured in a photo series made of ‘asphalt and iron’.
From A to Y shows the dark, dystopian world of the industrial harbor areas of Amsterdam. A huge no-go area that is over 35 square kilometer, but only 380 people live in it, those are all for sure harbor workers. For people in Amsterdam it is a ‘black hole’. Surrounded with fences and gates, guarded by barb wire and cameras, for number of reasons, mostly safety reasons like terrorism. This unique photo series shows everything what happens inside this mysterious ‘black hole’. This is the harbor industry of Amsterdam in black and white, From A to Y.
The series took three years to accomplish. It took a portfolio book and a lot of visits, phone calls, emails and persistence to get access to the industrial sites and factories. I convinced most companies to work independently with me and give full access to their sites. I took a course to get a special work and safety license, necessary to to shoot on industrial sites. I traveled by foot, bike, boat, car and used a drone to capture this area. I was inspired by Burtynsky’s series Oil, and the black and white work of Robert Häusser.
About Bart Vos
Bart Vos is an Amsterdam based autodidact photographer and filmmaker. He studied audiovisual journalism and worked for several TV and online media as an editor and reporter. He started freelancing 2014 and bought his first DSLR. He bought the camera to film and produce documentary films with it. But after a while he became more and more serious about photography. The first documentary photography project he shot in Indonesia, named Meat the Butchers, was selected for the 2015 edition of the Australian Head on Photo Festival. He returned to the Sydney based festival in 2016 and 2017 with other work, an industrial black and white series. It was exhibited in several group shows and solo show. In 2018 GUP Magazine selected him as New Dutch Photography Talent, with his black and white series ‘From A to Y’. The series was also featured by editors during the LensCulture Emerging Artist Award and the Black and White Awards. From A to Y was turned into a photo book and self published in October 2018, it sold over4 50 copies so far. [Official Website]
