MUSIC
The secret ingredient.
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.” ― Walter Pater
GYPSY JAZZ
Art, to me, is a quest, an endless arena with no rules other than to keep examining, investigating, and experimenting. My philosophy is to wander any creative path. To search without ever finding.
ARTISTIC PEDIGREE
I never planned to become a videojournalist, it just happened as it happened to my uncle Daniel Koning, who worked as a photojournalist for the Dutch newspaper ‘De Volkskrant’ for most of his life.
The aesthetics of his photographs became an inspiration for a generation of photographers.
I consider my uncle Daniel to be an artist. An artist who gave profound personal interpretations to the worldly events that made up his career as a journalist.
He challenged himself to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. To discover a visual storyline in every situation he was asked to photograph. It seemed to be a kind of ‘creative improvisation’: no endless overthinking, no re-arranging lights, models and sets. Instead, an observer who was catching moments in life as they happened.
I spent substantial parts of my childhood looking through the photobooks my uncle published. The famous people like Nelson Mandela he portrayed and the countries he visited.
He was an inspiration.
Just like my grandmother Paula Boeke, was an inspiration. She was a piano and violin teacher educated in London, an heiress to the influential British Cadbury family known for their chocolate empire and their prominent role in the Quaker ideology. Her father, my great-grandfather, Kees Boeke was a Dutch reformist educator, Quaker missionary and pacifist. He is best known for his popular essay Cosmic View (1957), which presents a seminal view of the universe from the galactic to the microscopic scale. My grandfather Paul Koning, was a painter and a sculptor. My father, Jeroen Koning, was a photographer and videographer and still is a writer.
At our family dinners, journalism, cinematography, philosophy, social engagement, literature, arts and music always blended seamlessly.
