Shield Photograph - Limited Edition of 7

Vera van Almen is a Dutch Photographer born in 1986. She graduated at the Academy of Photography in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2017. After graduating her work has been awarded the Dutch New Talent 2018, the European New Talent 2019, an honorable mention at the IPA 2017 and her work was also shortlisted for Canova Prize NYC18 and ROMART 2017 Biennale Internationale di Arte e Cultura. Vera participates in exhibitions and competitions in Holland and abroad. Her work has been shown in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, 's-Hertogenbosch, New York, Rome and Barcelona. Vera van Almen expresses an ephemeral view on life, handling concepts such as loss and desire. She is inspired by the Japanese phrase “mono no aware” – the realisation that all life and everything in existence is fleeting. Through this, van Almen finds beauty in transience. On a quest for beauty and serenity, seeking the silence beneath the noise, her images are characterized by a softness and longing that she associates with Romanticism. Embracing contingency and appreciation of the unpredictable are of great value in her working process. By allowing the unpredictable to happen she can transcend the conventional process of creating an image. It enables her to conceive the unexpected without the interference and limitations of her ratio. Analogue techniques are eminently suitable to explore contingency in the process of creating images. That's why she just loves analogue photography, especially polaroid.