Q1. Your work, always seem to live between calm and unease. What draws you to that emotional space?
I’m drawn to moments that look peaceful but feel heavy underneath. The constant awareness that something beautiful could suddenly break. Maybe you remember being a kid, watching thunderclouds gather on a summer day, knowing that peaceful feeling would soon turn to fear. It’s about that tension. I think that comes from my own anxiety; I deal with that a lot in my personal life. In a way, my work is just a way of externalizing that tension I carry inside.

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Q2. Much of your work explores masculinity in unconventional ways. Why does that theme matter so much to you?
Growing up I both feared and admired masculinity, and in some way I still do.
My work is how I process that, by showing masculine bodies as fragile, sensitive, emotional. I’m not trying to redefine masculinity, I’m just showing how complex it is, how it can hold fear and beauty at once.

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Q3. You graduated at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague with your photo book ‘The Boy Who Couldn’t Catch the Ball’. This touches on that same subject. Can you tell us about it?
That feels like a lifetime ago, haha. I grew up in a small town, shaped partly by Polish culture, where ideas of gender and strength can be pretty traditional. In high school we still had separate gym classes, and I had to compete with sixty loud, aggressive boys. I was terrified of it. I was always reminded of what I wasn’t. The Boy Who Couldn’t Catch the Ball came from that memory. It’s about growing up in a world that keeps asking you to perform a version of yourself that doesn’t exist. That project became the foundation for everything I do now; every image is still me trying to make peace with that boy.

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Q4. Your lighting feels very deliberate, sometimes cinematic and clean, sometimes raw and accidental. How do you approach it?
For me, light is emotion. It can be technically perfect or completely unpredictable, but it has to feel true. I use light to reveal something internal, it might simply be daylight, or a perfect studio setup that still feels human. I never want it to decorate. I want it to breathe, to carry tension. Even in my most polished images, I always try to hide a little chaos inside.

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Q5. If someone said, “That looks like a Martijn Mendel photo,” what would that mean?
That they see beauty, but sense something trembling underneath. Maybe they can’t explain it, but they feel it, that quiet unease, that intimacy between control and collapse. If someone recognizes that, then I think they’ve seen me.

Q6. Your work feel less like single moments and more like fragments from a larger universe. Do you see yourself more as a photographer, or something broader?
Photography is just one of the tools I use to build emotion. I’m always thinking in atmospheres, how the light, movement, styling, even silence fit together to tell one story. I want people to step into the work, not just look at it. That’s why I’ve been always leaning towards creative direction, because what excites me most is shaping the whole world around an idea, from the first reference to the final image. It’s less about taking pictures and more about creating a feeling that lives beyond them.