They will be hard to miss: seven life size portraits that will pop up at High Tech Campus Eindhoven in the next couple of weeks. Each photo portrays a story of hopes and dreams of people working on this smartest square kilometer in The Netherlands. And who better to capture these stories than @fetching_tigerss?
“Can you take off your shirt?” It’s 4 pm at High Tech Campus and the sun is shining. Annegien Schilling is giving instructions for the photoshoot. She is only sixteen years old and better known as fetching_tigerss. This high school student from Utrecht is immensely popular on Instagram where she posts surreal self portraits. She has about 731K followers.
Pictures by fetching_tigerss on Instagram
“Folkert, can you throw the paint?” Folkert is Folkert Huysinga. Facilitator and trainer / coach at High Tech Campus. And driving force behind this unusual photo project. One evening he was watching Jeugdjournaal (a Dutch news show for children) and saw an item on Annegien. It triggered him. Could she also makes such portraits of other people, he wondered. He contacted her and invited her over to High Tech Campus to portray the people working there. What are their dreams, who are they really? Folkert hopes these portraits will change the way we look at each other. And hopefully pave the way for making new connections.
Prior to the photo shoot Annegien met with the participants. The meetings helped her to form an idea of how she wanted to portray the persons and edit the pictures. She likes to focus on the not-so-obvious. “When someone smiles a lot, you could work with that smile, but I choose not to. I like to discover what is underneath and tell that story.”
Annegien uses several apps to edit the photos. Watch this video to learn more about her way of working. And then there are the items she brings to each photoshoot to support the story she wants to tell, such as a light bulb or the colored powder that Folkert managed to buy from a local Indian restaurant.
It is half past six and the photoshoot is done. Time for Annegien to head back to Utrecht and edit the material. The result will be presented at the end of October near The Strip on the Campus.
This photo project is part of a series of ‘happy interventions’ undertaken by the Inspiration Center led by Folkert Huysinga. His aim is to bring the people of High Tech Campus together and to develop a creative and interpersonal ecosystem on the Campus.
Text and photos: Renske Mehra
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