Meinke ten Have

My practice is rooted in photography, collecting and the archive. I am drawn to images and objects that already exist and were often made, used or kept for reasons other than art. I am interested in what happens when these materials are taken out of their original context and looked at again.

Much of my work begins with ordinary things: photographs found online, domestic interiors, personal objects, decorative choices and things that have been kept, discarded or left behind. I am particularly interested in the point where something seemingly insignificant starts to reveal something personal about the person who chose, used or lived with it. When collected in larger numbers, similarities begin to appear. Things that seem very individual can suddenly feel familiar or shared.

Collecting is an important part of how I work. I build archives over long periods of time, often without knowing beforehand what their final form will be. I sort, print, photograph and rephotograph, crop and rearrange material, looking for relationships between things that originally had no connection to one another. Categories often emerge while working with the material rather than being decided beforehand.

My background is in constructed photography, where much of the image is decided before the photograph is made. My current work moves in almost the opposite direction. Rather than starting with an image I want to create, I begin with something I have found and try to understand why it holds my attention. Photography has become a way of looking again at things that might otherwise remain unnoticed.

I am interested in archives as subjective structures. What is included, what is left out and what is placed next to something else changes how the material is read. Across my projects, I return to questions around intimacy, taste, memory and value, and to the ways people leave parts of themselves behind in images, objects and spaces.