“See you in a different life.”

We all know that expression. I always assumed that it meant: “see you in the afterlife” or “never see you again“. But lately I’ve come to understand this sentence a little bit better. You can have several lives in one lifespan. In one phase of your life you can meet people and perfectly coexist without getting to know each other. In a later phase those people pop up again in a different context and they take up a very different role in your life. There are a few people that were also there in an earlier stage of my life but they were “just extras”, colleagues some even coworkers. Some became friends and some of them even to very close friends, inner circle stuff. There will be some more portraits within this context, I just need to convince them to be portrayed. 😉

R. is one of those who rocketed themselves to the inner circle somehow. We were colleagues for a month or two at Duval Guillaume. After a couple of years we became colleagues again when I moved to BBDO. I was a Digital Producer at the time, R. was Art Buyer there. That’s about 13 years ago. We had little or nothing to do with each other. I had no idea what the hell Art Buying was all about (imagine that 🙃), the only thing I knew that there was always tons of noise coming out of that cubicle. I changed careers and and became advertising photographer, she became Producer and after a while R. started her own Production Company. At that time I was desperately looking for an honest production company that could support me in my work/career. We started working together and that just worked well, surprisingly. We had somehow different views on how to run things. That led to light or heavy discussions, sometimes it even resulted in a good old fight. Not in a destructive way, both just hanging on to our point of view.
Being able to discuss and fight in all honesty is what makes or breaks human relations for me. I only fight with people who are close to my heart, the rest leaves me indifferent, sort of…

I think honesty and ambition is what we like in each other. I think the honesty is what made us evolve from working together towards friends. Good thing we both know were the line between working together and being friends needs to be drawn. We are honest enough for that!

”I met them in one life but found them in a different one!”

All shot with Hasselblad 501 CM on Ilford Delta 3200