“I’m very curious—sometimes too curious for my own good,” explains Belgian artist Luuk van Raamsdonk as he introduces his ongoing project My Sweet Elora. “The unknown plays a serious role in this project. It directly involved me not only as a photographer, but also as a son and a grandson.”
The series opens with a stamped date, 29 Sep 1970. Curved letters, handwritten, above it spell out: “Never die, my love.” A caption informs the reader of the meaning of this inconspicuous date: “The day my grandfather disappeared without a trace.”
© Luuk van Raamsdonk
It was a family event that had greatly shaped the photographer’s own life that led to his curiosity about his grandfathers’. “My mother found out that my father was having an affair. It divided the family. Knowing what happened here was something rooted in the past, I started searching in my family archives as my father used to take pictures of my grandfather,” says van Raamsdonk. “My grandfather was an avid traveler. I was curious, where did it all go wrong? Because I was angry and sad, I thought I would recognize myself in his behavior. I’m scared of repeating the cycle.”
At the time he was working on a different project, What Once Was, documenting the Ardennes region of Belgium. The haunting black and white photographs depict a region tied to its natural surroundings and still recovering from an economic downturn. This pervading sense of mystery and quiet would follow into his new work.
“It just caught up to me emotionally as I started looking through these images. My hands were tingling, I needed to do something. I needed to work with these feelings. So the project started with confrontation.” Where do photographers get their ideas? How do they start on a project? For van Raamsdonk, a family secret, marked by a date in time and a mysterious disappearance, set him on the trail for answers.
What happened next sounds like the plot of a film but often enough life is stranger than fiction. “I found a suitcase with pictures and documents in it, and tickets too. My grandfather went to a village in Canada in 1970 when my grandmother was pregnant with my father.” He would return three months later, without discussing where he had been. A folded page of a book with a poem, titled Elora, was one of the clues that kicked the project off. For van Raamsdonk, this discovery felt momentous. “It embodied the current event. It’s the same story, but in a different time frame. The work became a meditation on intergenerational trauma and the repetition of patterns, how the past affects the present. It’s also trying to visualize and make sense of the whole situation.”
© Luuk van Raamsdonk
Early on in the series, van Raamsdonk presents two images paired together. In one we see a young woman from behind, hair flying as she turns perhaps to address someone in the crowd. In the other, a young man looks away from the camera, out of the photograph. The two are separate yet the link is there. The caption reads, Untitled. My grandfather and his unknown affair. Elora.
Photography is a process-based medium. The camera is a tool, both a buffer and an invitation into a situation. In My Sweet Elora, van Raamsdonk balances the personal connection with being one step removed. He is both distant and deeply entwined with the project’s subject, moving between two places and times. Gathering evidence, asking questions, analyzing space. Unable to pin down a simple, straightforward answer van Raamsdonk followed the traces he had to find something more ambiguous, a widening path forward.
Van Raamsdonk has retraced his grandfather’s journey to Canada twice. As he discovered his ancestor’s enigmatic landing spot, his grip on his original quest loosened, allowing him to forge his own relationship to the place. Elora is located in Ontario, roughly an hour and a half from Toronto, known for the limestone cliffs that form a gorge where the Grand River passes through.
“The first time I went to Elora it was with the idea of taking the same pictures that my grandfather had taken. Traveling for photography never goes as planned. Everything went south but it allowed for certain things to happen. I got very lucky, meeting certain people and being at the right place at the right time. Photography for me is as much about letting things happen and being present enough to catch them as it is just looking for those things.”
Pairing his own photographs with those from the family archive, van Raamsdonk made conscious decisions to shape the narrative, explaining, “I’m trying to achieve a conversation between the two by zooming in and out and allowing for a certain playfulness. There’s a constant line of ambiguity. The archival work is more zoomed out, playing the role of establishing the scene and the characters whereas my own work visualizes emotion.”
One can see the jumps between Belgium and Canada, between now and then, the known and unknown.The series also contains snippets of text from his grandfather’s diary as well as his own words, a weaving together of voices from past and present. For the photographer, the text “is a mark of guidance or a sort of handle for people to hold on to as they look at the work. The project needs a bit of text for the viewer to dial into. It provides some grounding, and a bit of plot.”
A series of archival photographs, small black-and-white images floating on a white page, provide scraps of context—family history delicately and opaquely spread across the panels. At times, faces are obscured by overly-bright exposures. At others, a cropped edge catches a line of people in exuberant motion. A child bends over observing something in the woods. A young man runs towards the mountains. In van Raamsdonk’s own image of a balloon caught in the inky black waters of a marshland, we see a potential inverse of a family photo, the bright light of the sky streaming into a cavern. A clue perhaps to some of the impetus for travel or escape paired with a reminder that one can’t simply outrun their past.
The new images capture a quiet in Elora as if it is populated by ghosts. Figures seen from afar, rain smudges on a lens, a clearing illuminated at night. “I think things happen and you have to be sharp enough to pick them up and follow through,” he explains. There is a searching quality to the work, a sense of an artist figuring things out in real-time, and trying to confront the inherited dynamics that threaten to play a role in his own life.
Photography’s magic often comes from its blend of science and art, its ability to both capture and create anew. To use a camera is to be curious about the world, to look for answers both near and far. With his grandfather’s clues as a guide, van Raamsdonk is in search of his elusive familial unknown, threading together past and present, as he constructs his own future.
Editor’s Note: Luuk van Raamsdonk came to our attention when he participated in the LensCulture Black & White Photography Awards 2023. Take the time to discover all 38 of the winning photographers and finalists.
