BASTIAAN WOUDT

My work begins with looking. At lines, at form, at the space between a body and its shadow.

I work primarily in black and white. Not as a style but as a decision. Colour distracts me from what is actually in the frame. Without it, what remains is structure, contrast, and presence. Nothing else carries the image.

I am self-taught. In 2009 I bought a camera to photograph my son. What started as instinct became an obsession with image-making that has not stopped since. I learned to see through the old masters: Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Man Ray. Their use of light and restraint shaped the way I look. Monochrome is how I learned to see, and it is how I continue to work.

My practice spans portraiture, landscape, still life, abstraction, and, more recently, AI-generated imagery and sculpture. The medium changes. The impulse does not: to reduce an image to its essential components and hold it there. The face becomes form. The body becomes architecture. But the human presence remains.

I enter every session without a plan. No shotlist, no fixed image. The best work comes from staying open to what happens between photographer and subject. Precision follows later, in editing, in printing, in the decision of what survives.

The print is the work. A photograph on a screen is a draft. It becomes real on paper, on a wall, held in a specific light. Surface, weight, and scale are part of the image. I work with one printing studio worldwide and review every print before it leaves.

I do not try to send a message. I prefer to create space for people to feel and reflect. Art should open something, not close it. The strength of a photograph lies in its simplicity. And simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve.