Wim Melis – Thirty-Five Years of Seeing

Paulien Dresscher: How did you first come into contact with photography, where did it begin?
Wim Melis: “During my student years I stumbled into it by chance. I was studying astronomy and applied physics, with a brief detour into philosophy, when a housemate set up a darkroom in the attic. I was immediately fascinated. What grabbed me was observing the world through a camera, its directness, and the craft of the process. I joined the ‘Tuesday evening group’ of the cultural student foundation USVA, where we focused on developing a personal style and vision. The politically engaged and better-known Groningen Foto Kollectief was also active there. At the time, I was inspired by fierce discussions about the content of photography: why do you make a photograph? What do you want to say with it? How do you develop your own voice? What makes a photograph good, and what can a photograph achieve as a socially engaged medium? Ton Broekhuis, later the director of Noorderlicht, was a teacher and initiator in both groups.”

“Towards the end of the eighties I became involved with the team programming the USVA photo gallery, which had existed since 1980, first on Oude Boteringestraat and later at the Munnekeholm. The organizational side and curating began to fascinate me just as much as photographing itself: working with people who share your passion, the dialogue with makers, and finding an audience for our stories.”

“In 1990 the USVA photo gallery turned ten and we wanted to make a special photography celebration, together with the city, local galleries, and photographers. We came up with the name Noorderlicht and went looking for funding. With a lot of effort we raised 30,000 guilders. That allowed us to fill the entire city with photography. There wasn’t a tight long-term policy plan behind it; it grew organically from the ground up, out of love for the medium.”

PD: But it didn’t turn out to be a one-off party, Noorderlicht was born?
WM: “In the first year about ten people were involved in the organization. I was one of them, but that year I was also mainly focused on graduating. Because the festival was so well attended and appreciated, a follow-up beckoned. The year after that I took on coordination—by then I had graduated—while others worked on policy. In 1995 I became the curator. From that moment on I independently curated 22 festival themes, up to 2019, when collaboration with guest curators began.”

“The festival grew, first nationally and then internationally. Noorderlicht positioned itself intellectually at the intersection of photography, visual culture, and documentary practice. Over the years, Noorderlicht grew into an important international platform. After ten years of volunteer work—the first decade nobody thought legitimate jobs would ever come of this—in 1999 the shift began toward a professional organization with cautiously paid staff. In 2000 the festival became annual, alternating between Groningen and Friesland.”

“Finding new and interesting makers and showing them within the context of our themes—that was our core activity. Each year we chose a different current, socially engaged theme to explore through the festival. Especially before the internet era, that meant real digging: traveling, combing through magazines, building networks. Later the focus shifted from ‘discovering’ to more of a guiding role, creating new connections with images from all corners of the world, in order to offer audiences an experience that stays with them. That shift in working methods had consequences for Noorderlicht’s position, including beyond Groningen.”

“In Friesland we pioneered by placing photographers from other parts of the world at the center of the early Frisian themes. In that way Noorderlicht unlocked another way of looking: it became a journey of discovery through images that were still barely known here. Our thematic exhibitions traveled all over the world. In 2004, for example, Nazar about the Arab countries was a success that could be seen in fifteen countries, from Syria to the United States and Singapore. In those years we were also named in the international press multiple times as one of the best photo festivals in the world. That really is something to be proud of!”

“A milestone was moving into our own building in 2004, on the Akerkhof. Finally we had a professional gallery space and decent workplaces for all staff. That’s when Noorderlicht took its definitive shape: an annual festival, a permanent gallery, and a project office that created cross-pollinations with external partners. That institutional anchoring made it possible to work more ambitiously, with a longer breath and more room for experimentation. All of this was only possible thanks to an enormously driven group of Noorderlichters, each using their talent in their own area. Because the team was small, the work was varied, which personally appealed to me a lot. I worked closely with the first two directors on policy, and also took on financial steering.”

PD: It didn’t take long before digitization entered photography—how did you deal with that?
WM: “We experienced the enormous technical changes in photography up close. Because of my background in the sciences, I had a natural affinity with it. Outside Noorderlicht I had also already been active in that area. Together with a partner who had ideas about introducing digital techniques for photojournalists, we founded a company at the Zernike Science Park. Among other things, we developed a unique method that allowed you to send photos from a computer to the then still analog picture desks at newspaper editorial offices. That bridge between old and new technology was a special experience, and I later brought it into my work as a curator at Noorderlicht. For instance, I initiated our website early on, set up the Noorderlicht Photo Lab, and introduced color management. Suddenly we could produce high-quality exhibition prints ourselves: that helped enormously with costs, in our always financially constrained sector.”

“At Noorderlicht everything began in the darkroom—with manual developing and printing—but by the late nineties a phase began in which photographers scanned their negatives and prints and sent us those scans. For everyone it was new, and the scans we received required a lot of retouching. Noorderlicht even had a retouching department on staff that corrected the files for every festival. Later digital cameras became better and more accessible, and from capture onward everything could stay in the digital domain. That whole transition took about fifteen years. With the arrival of smartphones around 2010, photography became even more accessible than it already was: the craft-based thresholds disappeared and suddenly everyone could share his or her photos with the world. The medium, always democratic, exploded into an overwhelming quantity of images that continues to grow to this day.”
 

“That technological acceleration didn’t remain limited to the medium itself; it had direct consequences for how photography was made, distributed, and valued—the sector changed profoundly because of it. Documentary and journalistic photography in particular had a hard time. Steady commissions disappeared, budgets shrank, and many photographers lost their market. The top tier remained, but had to adapt to the new market. For the broad middle it became harder to build a professional livelihood. Many photographers responded by moving toward the art world, looking for new ways to show and finance their work. For me as a curator, it also meant a shift: the guiding role became even more important. Even within democratized imagery, photography needed to be highlighted with meaning—something that could provoke the viewer and draw them into a story.”

PD: By now we have a new technological revolution, Artificial Intelligence (AI). How do you look at that?
WM: “I have mixed feelings about it. We gain accessibility, diversity, and new forms of image use. AI adds something else that’s special: unlimited imagination. You no longer have to limit yourself to reality—and that makes it exciting. At the same time we lose calm, depth, craftsmanship, and trust in images is damaged by AI. That last part especially is problematic. If everyone can make their own reality, what is our shared reality then? This development feels fascinating, inevitable, and frightening all at once. You can’t separate the visual aspect from the broader social context: we can already see jobs starting to disappear because of AI, and the distribution of prosperity becoming even more imbalanced.”

“In today’s constant stream of images, you have to compete for attention more than ever. People with a distinctly personal vision still stand out, but there is so much that developing a truly distinctive signature has become incredibly difficult. We also see fewer trends; with the history of photography at everyone’s fingertips, inspiration can come from anywhere.”

“For the curator, an important question becomes: what is the added value of an exhibition or a festival if everything is already accessible online, and the audience thinks it has already seen it all? Within Noorderlicht we discussed that a lot. For me the answer is clear: an exhibition must be an experience. Visitors step into another world for a while—an environment where they can get lost, discover, and be moved. For me, the essence of photography exhibitions is not only in selecting images, but precisely in offering context: telling coherent stories and bringing together work by different makers, preferably in a range of styles, within a single narrative that rises above the fleeting. That’s how you can give meaning to the image stream coming at us.”

“As a counter-reaction, you also see that for a small group of makers photography is becoming a craft again. A need emerges for humanity, personality, the tangible signature of the maker—the longing for the individual gesture. What remains most important to me is the conviction that photography—despite all changes—only truly gains meaning and quality when it tells stories and moves people. That is, and remains, Noorderlicht’s reason for being.”

And what’s next for you?
Wim: “My sudden illness has put everything into a different perspective. Things are going well now, but during the initial fright I noticed I only thought about my family, not about Noorderlicht. Then priorities suddenly become clear. Alongside thirty-five years of love for photography, there were also thirty-five years of running in the cultural-political arena. We had plenty of ideas, but money—that was always the bottleneck. It was a lot, and looking back, I maybe should have paused more often, enjoyed the moment more.”

“Now that circumstances are leading to a farewell to Noorderlicht, I’m going to take real rest for the first time. Finally, that sabbatical that never happened. I’m going to explore what I still want and can do: writing, maybe staying active in the field on a small scale, with more room to reflect. And I’ll see if I can, despite reduced motor skills, finally take up the guitar seriously.”

— december 2025, by Paulien Dresscher, guest curator Noorderlicht Biënnale 2021 The Makeable Mind, and since 2025 Noorderlicht board member.

Would you like to send Wim a note? You can at wimcurates(at)gmail.com