Eldin van Hengst, who works under the name Diginaat, was fifteen when photography first became something more than an interest. He photographed objects and landscapes with a neighbour, then arranged an internship with a commercial photographer in Rotterdam. The assignment was catalogue clothing on mannequins. The photographer reminded him that photography also had to make money.

Van Hengst remembers thinking about something else entirely: the photographs he wanted to make of real people, and the need to make them on his own terms.

The unpolished truth of vulnerability

What attracts Van Hengst to portraiture is not technical perfection but vulnerability. Sharpness is secondary to energy. A photograph can be flawed, uncontrolled or rough and still succeed if it contains a feeling.

For him, imperfection is not simply an aesthetic device. It is evidence of something human. This attitude extends into a practice that can be sensual, turbulent and eccentric, often dealing with emotional and painful subjects without trying to smooth their edges.

Making without a map

Van Hengst does not describe his process as orderly. Ideas may begin with a face, an emotion, the atmosphere of a building, another artist, or even the way light behaves inside a video game. Helmut Newton can sit beside an unexpected visual reference with no need for hierarchy.

The process that follows is intuitive and experimental. He thinks in images more easily than in words and rarely knows what the finished photograph should look like before he begins. Working with a model therefore becomes a search rather than the execution of a fixed plan.

He follows impulses and allows the work to reveal its own direction.

Life and work as the same thing

Van Hengst makes little distinction between photography and life. One does not merely influence the other; in his description, they are intertwined to the point of being the same thing.

That became clearer when he started his business. At first he believed becoming a “proper” photographer meant making the kinds of happy family portraits he saw around him. Encounters with people who encouraged his more extreme ideas changed that. The lesson became almost a rule: if an idea seems too much, push it further.

Over time, concern about how others might receive the work gave way to trust in his own instinct.

“I Close My Eyes Coldly”

One of his most personal works, I Close My Eyes Coldly, was made in 2022 in memory of a friend. The work confronts a life overwhelmed by unbearable pain and tries to hold strength and vulnerability in the same image.

It belongs to a wider body of work in which titles themselves often carry emotional weight: disappearance, fear, silence, longing and private spaces appear not as captions after the fact, but as extensions of the atmosphere inside the photographs.

What happens when the darkness changes

Van Hengst now finds himself in an unfamiliar creative position. Much of his earlier inspiration came from darker periods of his life. Recently, he says, he has become happier than he has ever been.

That happiness creates its own artistic question: what does a practice built partly from pain become when the artist is no longer living in the same darkness?

For now, his largest project is rediscovering himself as an artist and allowing this lighter chapter to enter the work without forcing it to resemble what came before.

A space without limits

The next practical dream is a studio: a place where the ideas in his head can become physical without the restrictions of a single medium. He wants to experiment beyond photography and work more openly as a multidisciplinary visual artist, eventually bringing those explorations together in a solo exhibition.

The aim is not to become less extreme. It is to discover what extremity, vulnerability and freedom look like when they are created from a different emotional place.

Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind photographic practice.