Ambiguity may be the clue: there is the material, and there am I intruding my private intent. I know the imminence of the world and experience it with full sensuality; at the same time I am involved with the projection of myself as idea. Strong tensions are inevitable, pleasurable and disturbing. Is not the esthetic optimum order with the tensions continuing? —

Aaron Siskind, Creative Camera, May 1970

Today's contender, Jaap E. Helder, has a few things in common with someone that I consider one of the great photo-art gods, Aaron Siskind. Both of them find photographic inspiration in the landscape and environments of coastal Maine, and both of them have a painterly sensibility as regards texture, marks, depth and formal composition in the frame of an image.

Franklin 9, 2010 by Jaap E. Helder

Maine 1, 1949 by Aaron Siskind

Hailing from the Netherlands and originally trained as a painter, Helder has found in his residence in Maine many echoes of a childhood past spent in a busy, industrial harbor town. His images speak to a love of color and line interrupted by the element of a time which causes decay, and in its overlap with a seen subject, completes it. From Helder's artist statement:

Living in coastal Maine, I am inspired by the raw beauty of the landscape and the Atlantic Ocean, the worn surfaces I see around me, especially the ships in the harbors with their many layers of industrial paint, scratched and marked and worn down by the elements.

Through the relationship of colors, forms, and marks, through rhythm and balance, and the physical and psychological work... I draw the viewer into an imagined landscape, into a colorful, dynamic world that hovers between the abstract and the representational.

Trenton I, 2010 by Jaap E. Helder

There is in Helder's work a large playground for sensual visual pleasure: forms interrupt forms, overlap, elements that in painting would require many built-up layers and scraping away with a palette knife here only require the passage of time and the caprices of wind and sun. Like Siskind, his is a very formal eye, and there is nothing arbitrary about what constitutes the edges of a frame, or its interior. What we are given to look at as a final photographic vision is the product of a situation where the artist has looked and looked and looked again at this same scene dozens of times. Like a painter before a blank canvas summoning up the composition hours or days before a mark is ever made, that is the process by which these images have been realized.

A complete catalog of Helder's photographs as well as paintings are nicely laid out on his website.