(Personal work, 2020)

A serie of close up images from eatable seaweeds & shells, that wash up at the shore, i took them up myself & take them into the studio to make some abstract stills.(some of them you can eat straight out of the sea & they taste really good)

It differs a bit from my regular work in the sense that most is done in camera, there is very little retouching involved. The light on the seaweed produces very nice colours & texture that you otherwise would not see when it was lying in the water.

©Wesley Dombrecht

The Sealand coast is a source of inspirationn for me, i often go there to clear my mind . One day during a walk along the Easterschelde, I saw a wide variety of edible seaweeds and shells that wash up there, so the idea came to me to make a series of close-up images of these edible seaweeds and shells.

Over there i also met Jan Kruijsse from 'De Zeeuwse SeaweedShop', he is one of the few in the Netherlands with a license to cut seaweed.

Every day at low tide he travels over the tidal banks of the Easterschelde nature reserve to harvest red horn seaweed, sea lettuce, wireweed, Irish moss, Japanese berry weed and in season also wakamé ,he was so kind and gave me some more info about his work & some of these algaes...
Many gastronomic chefs from Belgium & the Netherlands come to Jan especially to buy these products and use them in their culinary creations.