– Over tea, you show her the object: your father’s wristwatch. It stopped running in 1997. You have kept it in a drawer. “It’s old and broken,” you say.

It looks like a relic from a forgotten database—part Dutch ("maturenl" could hint at mature Netherlands or a username), part Slavic name ( Irenka : a diminutive of Irene, carrying warmth), part date (24 March 2029), and part mission statement: photographing my old as new .

But that makes it universal. are Irenka. You are the one who can photograph your old as new. You do not need permission, a studio, or a vintage camera. You need only to look at what you already own—the chipped mug, the stack of letters, the garden gloves—and give it the second gaze.

In Zen aesthetics, there is wabi-sabi : the beauty of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. Irenka’s work is wabi-sabi with a Dutch precision—clean backgrounds, careful aperture, but always a wrinkle, a scratch, a faded thread left in focus. Why that date? It is early spring. In the Netherlands, March 24th can be cruel or kind—perhaps snowdrops and crocuses are up, but the wind still bites.

If “my old as new” – a translation issue from Slavic languages (Polish: “moje stare jako nowe”). It implies a transformation: through Irenka’s lens, the old performs newness. This is the most likely meaning, given the Slavic diminutive “Irenka.”