Why?

I fell in love with photography through social media. As a young teen I used to browse Tumblr and this was the first time I felt what a photo could do to you. After that I picked up a camera with the goal to express my feelings and my view of the world, in the hopes that my photos could maybe resonate with someone else as well. Years later down the line I ended up feeling frustrated with my photography. I couldn’t really put a finger on what I was missing. But somehow I couldn’t make a single photo about which I truly felt satisfied. With the help of a lot of other people I ended up finding a new layer of depth in photography through exhibitions and photobooks. Afterwards I realized a lot of this frustration had to with the spaces my photography ended up. Most of my photography was used as content and because of that I approached my photography as content as well. After beginning to print my own work and approaching it as art something changed for me and I started enjoying photography again. But unfortunately this joy was short lived. Because at the same time I realized which spaces I wanted to inhabit with my photography, I realized that these spaces felt completely out of reach for the quality of work I was making at the time. Young Groninger Press was created to fill in exactly that gap for myself, but for other aspiring photographers as well. As a space that exists in between the fast paced social media spaces and the hard to reach art spaces. A space which used to be inhabited by newspapers and publishers. A space which can motivate and inspire young photographers to tell stories instead of making content.