"Contrast II" Photograph - Limited Edition of 10

Dieter Demey (°1982) is an award-winning architecture and landscape photographer based in Enghien (Edingen) in the Walloon Region of Belgium, near Brussels. He has studied photography at LUCA School of Arts, campus Narafi, where he graduated with honors in 2023 with a bachelor project on brutalist architecture in Belgium. Since 2024 he is active as a professional photographer, specialising in architecture, reportage, events and drone photography, alongside continuing to work on artistic projects.

The world is racing by. Images, messages and stimuli jostle for attention at a pace that leaves hardly any room for silence. It is precisely that silence that Dieter Demey seeks, and which he finds in architecture. Not in the buildings themselves, but in what remains when superfluous details are stripped away: a line, a shadow, a relationship between light and concrete. His work invites us to slow down, to pay just as much attention to what is not there as to what is.

This quest for essence translates into a style that has now become his signature: geometric, black and white, clean-lined yet layered. Demey approaches buildings as sculptures, as compositions of planes and lines that only reveal their true character when colour and context are stripped away. This approach, developed in the ‘Concrete Stories’ series, was honoured with the Grand Prix de Belgique (gold medal) and the international Architecture MasterPrize.

Alongside this geometric universe, Demey developed a second, innovative layer in his work: infrared photography. He is one of the very few people worldwide to employ this technique in this way within architectural photography, stripping reality of its familiar veneer. What remains is an image that no longer records, but suggests: an atmosphere reminiscent of a distant future or a forgotten comic strip, as if the contours were drawn in pencil or painted with a light invisible to the eye. It is in these images that Demey explores the boundary between photography and imagination, inviting the viewer to form their own interpretation.