Photographer Madeleine Sars on Connection, Light & Shadow Work
I met Madeleine Sars in my teens, when our pants were as big as our artistic dreams and our paths as wazig[1] as the cloud of smoke that followed us around everywhere. I can still see her now, the way I remember my first indirect encounter with her – how she confidently cruised by the city square on her omafiets[2] wearing clunky skate shoes, a bandana and a broad smile, making a quick stop to hash something out with the then-boyfriend before cycling off to do something cool and creative. Those were pretty much the first adjectives that came to mind when I first saw her – cool but approachable, creative in spirit and in style. When I learned she was studying photography, it immediately made sense with her whole persona.
It didn’t come as a great surprise to me when she told me that she had originally intended to become a psychologist. She exudes the kind of vibe that allows others – from friends to vague acquaintances to randos in a bar – to drop their guard and dive deep into their whole life story, complete with the most intimate details. The first time I ended up spilling my guts and a few kidneys to her, that wait-why-am-I-telling-you-this moment was brief. As a client of hers pointed out, Madeleine truly sees a person – not just as a friend and/or neutral listener, but particularly as a photographer. And being seen puts people at ease. She knows how to identify a person’s essence, and that’s not always found in a pretty face or a happy smile. “Some of my favourite pictures are those that tell the story best, that one shot you can just keep looking at. Most people like to see themselves smiling but often it’s the portraits with a serious or focused expression that take your breath away.”
While Madeleine has a knack for creating the right kind of space and vibe for people to feel comfortable in, she also knows how to use a bit of trickery to get the results she wants. Whilst shooting the portraits for Eshter-Clair Sasabone’s book Broers and Zussen. Hoe is het voor jou? (Brothers and Sisters. What’s it like for you?), a project by the Bureau Sterrenhof foundation focused on the brothers and sisters of a chronically ill sibling, she came up with a sneaky little plan prior to the shoot. “I told the models to find a comfortable position and keep looking into the camera, because it could take me a while to setup the light. I had told my intern to act like she was doing something with the lamp whenever I started giving her bullshit assignments like “put the light up to 6.3” (the max on my lights is 5.5). The models were under the impression I was still setting up and hadn’t actually started yet. I shot the entire series this way.” Needless to say, the portraits she got out of this approach are extremely moving – whether you know the subject’s story or not, you can feel it’s there, waiting to be coaxed out, longing to be asked: what’s it like for you?
Shot in her former studio in Utrecht – a historic haunt that was once a prison – the portraits for the book Broers and Zussen. Hoe is het voor jou? and how she lived the experience, all tie in with her work for the Nederlandse Transplantatie Stichting (Dutch Transplant Foundation), for which she started to work ten years ago. “In 2012 a big advertising agency decided to use my portraits in a pitch for a new website for the NTS. That’s how I ended up being asked to shoot 38 portraits in every corner of the country in 1 just one month. When I recovered after a year of being sick myself, I felt much closer to the patient experience and the fact that, strength and weakness can live side by side. That a person’s weakness can make them stronger, even while living with said ‘weakness’. So, I decided to try and find more customers in this niche and rekindled with my old love for psychology and people’s stories by taking up a two-year course to become a life coach. This made connecting with models so much easier, because besides all the things I already did subconsciously to connect with people, I also gained many tools to help people open themselves up to me.”
It's clear that Madeleine feels drawn to social themes, especially in terms of health. Since starting working with the NTS ten years ago, she has ventured further and has shot two campaigns for Het Huidfonds and series for Huidpatiënten Nederland, Stichting Vlinderkind, and National Association de Zonnebloem, one of Holland’s biggest foundations specialized in connecting volunteers to people with a disability. “I’ve shot around 170 portraits for the NTS. These are portraits of people on the waiting list, organ or tissue recipients, medical professionals, the surviving relatives of those who have donated organs and/or tissue, liver or kidney donors, Samaritan donors, people who work at or with the Transplant Foundation and people indirectly linked to the subject. The most intense shoots are always those surrounding the stories of surviving relatives.”
I asked Madeleine to be one of a handful of test-readers when I started working on a project – a continuing work in progress – that incorporates a lot of my own experiences with (mental) health. I asked her for feedback because I knew I could count on her for her honesty, to find the nuances, the lulls and pick out the strengths on which to build. The phone call that started out as a review of said project, ended up turning into a surprisingly personal conversation in which she somehow managed to get me to unpack a few key baggage items I’d been schlepping around with me for years. She urged me to not just look at the hardshell suitcase I’d shoved them all into, but to dig ‘em all out, peel them open like an onion and find their nucleus. And then to, basically, have at them, to put all those what ifs in the spotlight, and let them dance in all directions, carry all those terrifying thoughts out. It offered me a new perspective, one that took some of the weight out of some of that luggage.
One of the many things we discussed that late afternoon, was children – and this was at least two years before my daughter was born. I talked about my longings and my fears, confessed my appetite for self-destruction. I shared some truly weird shit with her, and I knew that one of the many reasons all this stuff came pouring out to her so easily, is because this woman is just as good at laughing at herself as she is at laughing at me – and that’s a quality I highly respect. I also knew that, if all the stars (and sperms) were to align, I would want to have her form a part of my own heksenring[3] to call on during those moments of positive and/or negative overload, and I’m glad to say she has. She sent me little reminders to slow down when I needed to, and made me feel understood when I felt few people did. We’ve never spent quality face-to-face time together; I’ve never been photographed by her. But I feel seen by her. If she were to snap my portrait, I know she would capture a part of me, that I myself may not be quite familiar with yet.
This intuition of hers, is exactly what makes her portraits so moving – the scenes may be set, but the moments and what her subjects are experiencing in them, feel candid. I’ve seen her work evolve for over a decade now and what strikes me time and again, is the fact that, she can find a person’s authentic spirit whether they are (im)perfect strangers or close friends. Having seen multiple portraits she shot of one of her friends, the artist and photographer, Lana Mesić, I can say with absolute certainty that she can find that je ne sais quoi in most people who cross her path – whether they’re just an unknown passant[4] biking by or someone who plays – or will go on to play – a significant role in her life. While her profound field of vision stretches across all her subjects, it has to be said that some of her best work happens when her lens and her heart is focused on women from all walks of life.
"In my work, I look for connection and light, I follow my intuition and go with the natural flow of things. If I had to define womanhood and motherhood, this connection to light and love, intuition, mirrors and deep shadow work comes to mind too," Madeleine explains. The portraits she shot for Yttje Feddes' book, Vakvrouwen - In veertig jaar landschapsarchitectuur (Professional Women – In Forty Years of Landscape Architecture), is just one of many female-focused assignments that exemplify this intrinsic approach perfectly. "I used different backdrops for these portraits, ranging from a burned-out forest and a calm sea to a WW2 site. Ten portraits of genuine female role models working in what was once a man's world: namely landscape architecture," Madeleine tells me. She had total conceptual freedom for this project, and that can be felt. This creative fluidity is something she works on, regularly, by turning inwards and reconnecting with her heart and what it truly thrives on.
Finding this inner peace is something she spent more time working on during a 9-month long shamanistic training that took place in a beautiful natural environment called BoschHoek. Having surfed close to the edges of a burnout during the second year of COVID, Madeleine learned how easy it is to lose yourself in the chaos of motherhood – of taking care of everybody and a hundred to-do lists. “Motherhood taught me to stay close to myself and how to reconnect with my heart and intuition when things got out of whack. And this is where creativity lies for me – if I chisel at my brain for long enough, I’ll force some concept out. But it’s when I quieten my head whilst looking at a picture of my future model, for example, that’s when the ideas flow easily.” As fate would have it, the training coincided with the pregnancy of her third baby, and so it happened that, the last photoshoot she did before going on maternity leave, captured the founder of this magical space.
And just as her contentedness and the very idea of sisterhood and a warm, safe place can be felt in the images she shot of the place that became such an important backdrop for her own journey, the connection she finds with people on a professional as well as a personal level can be felt even through a phoneline. So, it turns out my instincts were right too – I knew she’d go off on her fiets chasing light beams and confronting shadows in the most creative of ways. Only these days, I assume she’ll be rollin’ up to new assignments on a bakfiets, looking just as cool and inspired as she did back when I first met her.