From Afar (Vanuit de Verte) is the personal blog of Hans van der Kamp, a Dutch photographer, author of Nette Mensen in een Nieuwe Tijd, and independent magazine publisher.
This website presents long-form visual essays, photography projects, and reflections on image, identity, and contemporary culture.
A conversation about AI, doubt, and the quiet instability of truth Yesterday I had a conversation with my son about the fact that everyone at his workplace talks about AI all day. He uses AI occasionally himself, but for him it is not a topic that should replace all other office conversation. I do not … Read more
From autofocus to AI image generation, convenience becomes a method. Control becomes conditional. It only looks like its opposite. I work constantly, seven days a week if necessary, ten to twelve hours a day.. I work constantly, seven days a week if necessary, ten to twelve hours a day. Most office workers do not come … Read more
What AI reveals about authorship, visibility, and the quiet afterlife of personal archives. Why do I keep circling back to the early Internet, somewhere around 1994. Because I recognise the mood. Not just the AI revolution itself, but the performance around it. The certainty. The anxiety. The quiet satisfaction of those who believe they have … Read more
When the Internet arrived in Amsterdam around 1994, it exposed something quickly: people cannot handle the opinions of others. For a brief moment, everything seemed fine. Then came the complaints. Sexism. Discrimination. Sexism was inevitable. Computing was a male domain, and men among themselves say things they would rather not defend in public. Nothing new … Read more
A small experiment with a large implication: what an AI chooses to remove says more about us than about the machine. I had, of course, read the stories about OpenClaw. Installing an AI agent at home had started to feel less like curiosity and more like a calculated risk. Bank accounts emptied. Entire inboxes erased … Read more
On critics, Calvinism, and the strange persistence of a Dutch book Although I am more active as a photographer, I still find myself haunted by a novel I wrote more than thirty years ago. I will not mention its title here; I feel no need to promote it any further. What I do try, instead, … Read more
Wherever I go, I still hear people voicing their concerns about AI. The stories I hear bear a striking resemblance to the texts that once circulated about the Internet. I use AI as a tool and feel no shame about it, much as I felt no shame in the mid-1990s about using the Internet. By … Read more
The phrase “the Free West” is used as if it were self-evident. It rarely is. Behind it lies a mix of sentiment, selective memory, and a set of contradictions that are easier to ignore than to resolve. Yesterday it happened again. A professor began a sentence with the words, “We, in the Free West.” I … Read more
Every new medium promises freedom.A few years later someone tries to build a gate around it. One of the ways I keep life pleasant for myself is by not weighing a spontaneous idea before executing it. This mentality was quite common among people who, in the mid-1990s, were inventing projects for what was then still … Read more
The woman I was due to photograph at two o’clock that afternoon described herself as a burlesque performer. As a studio photographer I have learned that a certain amount of classification is unavoidable. Anyone who enters a large dark forest without recognizing its predators will inevitably be eaten alive. In the amateur circuit, burlesque performers … Read more