Dutch photographer Lise Straatsma remembers the exact day that sparked her headlong dive into the world of prepping.
It was November 13, 2015, when terrorists launched a string of coordinated attacks throughout Paris that killed 129 people. Straatsma was visiting the city for a photography festival and happened to be in a bar near one of the shootings. As she and the other patrons waited inside, it hit her that she had no idea how to protect herself—not just from a gunman, but more generally from any potential threat.
“If something really big was happening, and I had to take care of myself, I had very few skills to do so,” she says.
Attempting to assuage her anxieties, Straatma began researching how to protect herself, a journey that led her to a subculture of people in the Netherlands who actively ready themselves for potential crises and disasters. Since she was studying photography at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, it seemed only natural to document them—and her own eventual foray into prepping.
“It was a weapon against fear,” she says, discussing the genesis of her series The Alph
