On Willem….
https://youtu.be/Xi55gaN54Zo?is=RIGZ5-Ds9cR8sHwQ
The first thing you notice about Willem Verbeeck is that he is young enough to be your grandson and calm enough to be your analyst, which is a disorienting combination in a medium otherwise populated by men shouting at ring lights. He wanders through Brooklyn or the American West with a Pentax 67 slung across him like a piece of agricultural machinery, and he speaks to the camera in the measured tones of a man who has never once considered adding a klaxon to his opening titles. In an ecosystem where the average YouTuber greets you with the enthusiasm of a labrador discovering the sea, Verbeeck simply begins, as though you had already agreed the conversation was worth having. This turns out to be the most flattering assumption anyone has made about the viewing public since the invention of the medium.
What he actually does is photograph things, which sounds simple until you remember how few photography channels involve any photography. Most consist of a man unboxing a lens and reading the specifications aloud, a genre with all the dramatic tension of a customs declaration. Verbeeck instead drives to Texas, or Los Angeles, or some sun-bleached corner of nowhere, and comes back with pictures that look like stills from a Wim Wenders film that got cancelled for being too well composed. The photographs are good — annoyingly good, given his age — and he shows you the contact sheets, the failures included, which is the visual equivalent of a novelist publishing his crossings-out. It takes a certain confidence to display your mistakes to a million subscribers, and a certain talent to have so few worth displaying.
The medium-format obsession could easily have curdled into fetishism, because film photography on the internet is largely a hardware cult in which the camera is worshipped and the picture forgotten. Verbeeck escapes this by the simple expedient of caring more about light than logos. When he talks about why a frame works, he talks about the frame, not the serial number, and his videos on photographers like Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld function as a stealth education for viewers who arrived wanting to know which camera to buy and left having accidentally learned to see. This is the old trick of the best television: pretend to be about one thing while smuggling in another, like Attenborough pretending to be about animals while actually being about wonder.
He will get better, which is the alarming part. The videos are already composed with a patience that most filmmakers don’t acquire until their knees go, and the voice — unhurried, faintly amused, allergic to hyperbole — is the sort that usually takes decades of disappointment to develop. One watches him the way one watches a young batsman with a straight bat and all the time in the world: with pleasure, certainly, but also with the mild resentment of realising that some people are simply given at twenty-five what the rest of us were still queuing for at fifty. Subscribe, if only to say later that you were there before the retrospective.
