Photographer Sake Elzinga (66) from Assen has been in the business for almost 50 years. He has been through a lot in those years. For example, he photographed the train hijacking near Wijster in December 1975 as a sixteen-year-old. He eventually grew into one of the most striking photographers in the North.
His photos appeared in various newspapers at home and abroad, in books and exhibitions. Now he himself is the subject of the documentary The Eye of Time. Documentary maker Marjanne Teunissen captured his way of looking and the way in which the photographer keeps time.
“You almost have the feeling that this is the end, while it should be the beginning,” says Elzinga about the documentary. “The beginning of new memories. I still want to do so much and have so many plans.” He says he is happy that the film, which he initially did not want to participate in, has been made.
“I thought it wasn’t really my thing,” he explains. “I prefer to be on the other side. And I think I sound a bit nasal, which I don’t like.” He also calls it confrontational to see himself on film. “Then I see that I am a very little fussier after all.”
Images of him sometimes make you think that Elzinga is a serious person, businesslike. “But I’m friendlier than that,” he says. “And recently I cried at a Christmas movie.” The photographer wonders what people will think of him after seeing the film. But: “I just let it wash over me.”
When Elzinga was 16 years old, world news happened around the corner: the train hijacking near Wijster in December 1975. At that time, he worked outside of school in the dark room of a photo shop. “That darkroom was sacred at once,” Elzinga remembers. Press photographers from around the country used the room to develop the photos of the train hijacking.
That aroused the young photographer’s curiosity. On his moped, with only a wide-angle lens in his pocket, he drove to the site of the hijacking. “I had only had my moped for a week,” he reflects. He still has the photo he took there.
The text continues below the photos.