Venkat Iyer grew up in a small town near Mumbai and later moved to the Netherlands to work in tech, including a 12 year career at Booking. He’s now based in Amsterdam where he works as a photographer, loves the relaxed pace of life, and says Sylvia Kristel was his teenage crush.

How did you end up in the Netherlands?
I came to the Netherlands for work. I had the opportunity to go to Boston, London, or Amsterdam. At the time, it seemed nobody in my company wanted to go to Amsterdam. I was curious about the city and decided to find out more. This was in 2005. It was only supposed to be a short stint, just a few months, but I continued working here and started taking on more senior roles. Eventually I took a career break and now focus on photography and conservation.

I met amazing people, made friends, and the longer I stayed here, the more I started enjoying the country and its values. There’s the openness, the gentle sense of balance in society, and the interest in art and culture. I found that, coming from Mumbai where everything moves super fast, this place was so relaxed. There’s a place for both ambition as well as reflection, so I really enjoy being here.

How do you describe yourself – an expat, lovepat, immigrant, international?
I probably never saw myself as an expat, but I’ve jumped between immigrant and international. I would call myself more of an international now. My work now takes me all over the world. I’ve done a lot of portraits and wildlife photos, but I also like to do street photography, capture life as it happens, observe how people live in different places, and see how the street life of a city in Spain moves versus the street life of Amsterdam or New York.

Each one has a different character and a different pace. Photography for me is a way of observing the world closely and seeing different perspectives. It also helps me slow down a bit because my life is moving so fast. It grounds me and keeps me focused. I’m thankful this country has given me the space to become more than my work. I think all of this makes me an international who lives in the Netherlands.

How long do you plan to stay?
I don’t see myself ever leaving here. Amsterdam is home. It’s a place for so much creative work that I’m seeing and that I can do, things like the collaborations and conservation projects I’m doing. This is a good base for that. Amsterdam straddles two different ends of the world. You’re able to cover New York and San Francisco maybe as easily as Mumbai and Singapore. So this is where I’m going to be. 

Do you speak Dutch and how did you learn?
It’s hard, it’s been tough. I can read Dutch to a decent degree, but I cannot speak it. I keep trying to learn and failing. It’s humbling in many ways, but it’s also taught me to listen a little more carefully and take my time. It’s been a journey and one I think I’ll be on for a very long time.

Living in Amsterdam makes things easier because everyone speaks English, but this provides a very convenient excuse for people who de-prioritise learning Dutch. Something always becomes more important. But it’s also frustrating, because you can’t really get into Dutch society to the extent that you want, so you end up living on the border of it. It’s annoying for me at this point, but until I fix this on my end, it’s never going to get fixed.

What’s your favourite Dutch thing?
I have a couple of things. One is stroopwafels. I don’t eat them too much anymore but, when I moved here someone told me you should cover your coffee with one and let it sit for a bit. I did and I was hooked from that moment on.

Beside that, I love how walkable the cities are, especially Amsterdam, and how easy it is to go from Point A to Point B. So I think maybe that’s my favourite thing, just how easy it is to move around here.

How Dutch have you become?
In many ways, I don’t think I’ve changed too much, but there is one aspect of my personality that has become more Dutch than I was expecting and that’s my directness. I can now be even more direct than many Dutch people and I can be fairly blunt, but it’s also very refreshing.

In a workplace, it makes it easy to navigate whatever is going on. You can cut through so much clutter. Your communication becomes efficient. You say what you want to say quickly and you get it out of the way. In that sense, that part of Dutchness, has very much become a part of me.

Which three Dutch people (dead or alive) would you most like to meet?

 Sylvia Kristel. Let’s call this one a teenage crush. Let’s leave it there. For those who don’t know her, I’m going to leave it exactly there. I’m not going to say anything else.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. He was one of the key figures in the discovery of what we know today as the human cell. He had no scientific training, but he was able to observe microscopic life with his lenses. Before he was able to see these things, it was widely believed that all life could be seen with the naked eye. He changed that. I would like to sit down with him and ask what drove him to start looking for life where people weren’t looking for it.

Johannes Vermeer. There was an exhibition in Amsterdam last year where you could look at his paintings up close. Whether it’s The Milkmaid, The Girl With the Pearl Earring, or The Lacemaker, no matter which work of his it is, the light within it is simply divine. I’m a photographer so I love light. I’d love to sit down with him and ask what he thought about light. How did he see it? What was he feeling when he saw that light and translated it into a painting?

What’s your top tourist tip?
The NDSM-Plein in Amsterdam Noord. There’s a lot of amazing street art and that whole space is just different. It is the anti-Amsterdam in so many ways. You have Amsterdam, picturesque with its picture postcard light where everybody goes, and you have Amsterdam-Noord, which is not the Amsterdam you expect to see. There’s the Crane Hotel, for example. It’s exactly that, a hotel on a crane. It’s an interesting place to be and, for art lovers, it’s really, really cool.

Tell us something surprising you’ve found out about the Netherlands
The Netherlands is a very efficient country. It prides itself on efficiency and being very functional. There is also so much creativity. Creativity and efficiency don’t usually go hand-in-hand in many places, but there is so much appreciation here for design, minimalism, and nature.

The Dutch are super enterprising, but it still surprises me how independent minded they are. The sense of agency that I see in people, that every single person thinks they can do what they want to do, that they can just do things, it’s quite powerful.

If you had just 24 hours left in the Netherlands, what would you do?
I’d take my camera and walk everywhere, of course. It’s the most natural thing for me to do, to take as many pictures as I can. I’d enjoy coffee at some of my favourite cafes because I love the coffee in this city.

I’d try to find time to run in Vondelpark and go to Jazz Café Alto that night to listen to some music. Ideally, I would have liked to end the night with a whiskey at Whiskey Cafe L&B but, sadly, they just closed down.

You can support Venkat’s photography book project “Slowing Down” via this link and learn more about his projects on his website, Photos By Venkat.

Venkat Iyer was talking to with Brandon Hartley.