Down by the Water

Wormer, 2020

Robin de Puy (b. 1986) has lived for several years in Wormer, a small village surrounded by water just north of Amsterdam. Drawn throughout her career to the mythology and visual language of the American countryside, she discovered during the pandemic that the landscape on her own doorstep held a strikingly similar sense of mystery and possibility. The same distinctive characters, quiet rituals, and local landmarks she had long sought across rural America were, unexpectedly, close to home.

Following intuition rather than a fixed plan, De Puy began photographing the people she encountered. An eleven-year-old shaman led her barefoot through forbidden terrain. Four giggling brothers piled into the back seat of her car. A palm reader handed her the keys to his house moments after they met. Each encounter opened the door to another, gradually revealing a community shaped by generosity, imagination, and chance.

What emerged is more than a photographic series. It is a meditation on belonging, coincidence, and the quiet magic of everyday life, revealing a place where the familiar becomes uncanny and where unexpected encounters gradually formed a world in which De Puy herself found a sense of home.

“The longer I do not travel, the more I turn to the place where I live. I see how my new environment takes care of me. How the baker and the greengrocer bring my groceries to my doorstep every Saturday morning. How all kinds of people call this their village, their neighborhood, their home. I see families who have lived here for generations, I see refugees, outcasts and graduates, I see urban diversity mixed with a small-town state of mind.”

Book sale: Hannibal Books

31,7 x 24,3 cm
140 pages
Hardcover
Quadrichromy
Bilingual edition English-Dutch
ISBN 978 94 6388 789 2