Shows & Events

The FESTIVAL INTERNAZIONALE DI FOTOGRAFIA E ARTE (PhEST) in Monopoli, Italy is exhibiting my Lines and Lineage prints.

1 September to 1 November 2023

Lines and Lineage solo exhibition
PhEST
Stalle di Casa Santa
70043 Monopoli BA
Italy

About the work

Lines and Lineage takes aim at America’s collective amnesia of history. The work addresses the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, I chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. Portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—are paired with photographs of landscapes inside the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Lines and Lineage lifts the pervasive fog of dominant Western mythology and makes us question the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West. The work will be published as a monograph by Radius Books in Autumn 2019.

 

Reviews and praise for Lines and Lineage

“…Using a North American map from 1839 (the same year that photography is thought to have made its debut in Europe), Mr. van Houtryve traveled along Mexico’s old northern border to meet families who have lived in the region for centuries.

His equipment in the Instagram age? A 19th-century camera he found in a Paris antique shop. He stocked up on the glass plates and pungent potions needed for the wet-collodion process, a technique invented in 1851. Doing so, Mr. van Houtryve conjures what the West may have looked like in the Mexican era…”

— Simon Romero in The New York Times

 

“His portraits are carefully researched and historically relevant – all of his subjects are descendants of the area’s original Mexican inhabitants. Quiet and dignified, the images pay tribute to Nadar, whose powerful portraits Van Houtryve admires. He focuses on his subjects’ eyes, conveying a sense of their interior life. He presents the work in diptychs that juxtapose portraits with romantic landscapes, reflecting an intimate connection between humans and nature…”

— Elisabeth Biondi in Photograph Magazine

 

“…Photographing the descendants of families who live on the once-Mexican territory, Van Houtryve proves their existence within a dominant narrative that often ignores them. Using traditional nineteenth century photographic techniques, like wet plate glass negatives, the artist taps into the aesthetic of the 1800s…”

— Zachary Small in Hyperallergic

 

Artist interview video

 

Solo exhibition from 3 June to 3 September 2023

• inauguration from 2 – 6 pm on June 3rd

• round table discussion on AI at 5 pm with Gaspard Koenig, Helga Rouyer and Baudoin Lebon

La Chapelle – centre d’art contemporain
12 Impasse de l’Abbaye
78120 Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines

Ceci Tuera Cela – Chimères du réel
(This Will Kill That – Hallucinations of Veracity)

Can photography still bear witness to reality in the age of AI? How are relentless waves of technology impacting our lives and our relationship to the photographic image? How have automation, hyper-connectivity and artificial intelligence altered our perception of reality and veracity?

In 1832, in a chapter titled “This Will Kill That” of his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo wrote about technological upheaval and how the printed book had replaced the monument. A century later, the photographer revives this line of questioning. What are we gaining and what have we lost as we plunge headlong into the digital revolution?

The show features a retrospective of more than a decade of Tomas van Houtryve’s work that examines the changing place of photography in our lives, from drone surveillance to social networks to Artificial Intelligence.

Read the review of the show by Beaux Arts.

 

 

 

 

Notre-Dame: La Renaissance d’une Icon
solo exhibition, from spring 2023 to summer 2024

Parvis de Notre-Dame
Paris, 75004
France

Notre Dame: Rebuilding an Icon is a major exhibition featuring 21 large-scale photographs by Tomas van Houtryve, offering an exceptional view into the heart of the cathedral and its history. The solo show is located on the main square (parvis) in front of the Notre Dame cathedral of Paris and is open through summer 2024.

The outdoor exhibition features two sections. The first, The Cathedral After the Fire, features color photographs of the aftermath of the April 2019 fire that struck Notre Dame and the beginning of its massive restoration.

For the second section, Echoes of the Past, Tomas van Houtryve used a 19th-century wooden camera and the wet-plate collodion process to photograph the cathedral and make portraits of workers, scientists and artisans engaged in the rebuilding. The black-and-white photos seek parallels with Notre Dame’s previous restoration in the middle of the 19th-century, lead by the architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc.

Artist statement:

“My visits to Notre Dame left me inspired by the remarkable challenges of rebuilding and by the depth of the structure’s meaning: Notre Dame is more than a cathedral, and it has many facets.

The epicenter of historic events, a perennial muse, and a reoccurring motif, Notre Dame has been photographed since the very introduction of photography in 1839. To pay homage to its past, I decided to use two photographic approaches. This first color series highlights the exceptional scale and diversity of the current task.

Even in its most damaged state, Notre Dame remained a place of awe and veneration. As I explored the cathedral to document the aftermath of the fire and the beginning of the restoration, I was often struck by strong emotions. Rather than ignore this flood of intangible feelings, I tried to channel them into photographs.”

About the artist:

A contributor to National Geographic since 2012, Tomas van Houtryve uses a range of contemporary and early techniques, continually questioning and reinventing his approach to image making. For his previous work, he was awarded the ICP Infinity Award, the Bayeux Prize for War Correspondents, and the Roger Pic Award. He has been a member of the VII photo agency since 2010 and is represented by the Baudoin Lebon gallery.

The exhibition was produced by the public establishment responsible for the conservation and restoration of Notre Dame de Paris’s cathedral in partnership with National Geographic. The photographs are accompanied with graphics by Fernando Gomez Baptista. 

Coinciding with the exhibition, a special collection of fine art prints are available for a limited time.

The exhibition was announced on CNN. Many of the photos were first published in the Feb. 2022 cover story of National Geographic.

 

 

 

The Photaumnales festival is exhibiting my Lines and Lineage prints 

 

Lines and Lineage solo exhibition
5 Nov. 2021 — 17 Dec. 2021
Espace Matisse
101/119 rue JB Carpeaux
60100 Creil
France
tel. +33 (0)3 44 24 09 19

 

À propos de Lines and Lineage (English version below)

Lines and Lineage (« Lignes et lignées ») confronte l’amnésie collective américaine au sujet du passé mexicain du Far West. À quoi ressemblait le Far West avant sa conquête par les États-Unis en 1848 ? La frontière mexicaine se situait alors 1100 km plus au Nord. Elle suivait l’actuelle frontière entre la Californie et l’Oregon, courrait à l’Est du Wyoming avant de bifurquer vers la Louisiane. Le Mexique a régné sur ce vaste territoire durant la première moitié du 19ème siècle.

L’invasion américaine s’est produite juste avant que le procédé photographique, dévoilé à Paris en 1839, ne parvienne dans la région. Les représentations visuelles que nous connaissons si bien de l’Ouest américain ont été créées après 1848 : ce sont les photographies célèbres des cow-boys et des pionniers blancs, de la Ruée vers l’Or et de l’arrivée du chemin de fer. En revanche, les images de l’ère mexicaine de l’Ouest n’ont jamais été fixées dans nos mémoires.

C’est donc pour rendre visible cette ère mexicaine remarquable et invisible que Tomas van Houtryve a choisi de photographier le Far West à l’aide d’une chambre photographique à plaques de verre du 19ème siècle. Ses portraits des descendants directs d’habitants d’alors accompagnent, sous forme de diptyques, des prises de vue des paysages de l’ancienne frontière et des ruines de la période mexicaine.

 

About the Lines and Lineage

Lines and Lineage takes aim at America’s collective amnesia of history. The work addresses the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, I chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. Portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—are paired with photographs of landscapes inside the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Lines and Lineage lifts the pervasive fog of dominant Western mythology and makes us question the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West.

 

 

Lines and Lineage solo exhibition from 16 May to 29 June prolonged to 29 July, 2019

galerie baudoin lebon
8 rue Charles François-Dupuis
75003 Paris
France

Tel.+ 33 (0)1 42 72 09 10

 

About the work

Lines and Lineage takes aim at America’s collective amnesia of history. The work addresses the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, I chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. Portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—are paired with photographs of landscapes inside the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Lines and Lineage lifts the pervasive fog of dominant Western mythology and makes us question the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West.

 

 

Reviews and praise for Lines and Lineage

“…Using a North American map from 1839 (the same year that photography is thought to have made its debut in Europe), Mr. van Houtryve traveled along Mexico’s old northern border to meet families who have lived in the region for centuries.

His equipment in the Instagram age? A 19th-century camera he found in a Paris antique shop. He stocked up on the glass plates and pungent potions needed for the wet-collodion process, a technique invented in 1851. Doing so, Mr. van Houtryve conjures what the West may have looked like in the Mexican era…”

— Simon Romero in The New York Times

 

“His portraits are carefully researched and historically relevant – all of his subjects are descendants of the area’s original Mexican inhabitants. Quiet and dignified, the images pay tribute to Nadar, whose powerful portraits Van Houtryve admires. He focuses on his subjects’ eyes, conveying a sense of their interior life. He presents the work in diptychs that juxtapose portraits with romantic landscapes, reflecting an intimate connection between humans and nature…”

— Elisabeth Biondi in Photograph Magazine

 

“…Photographing the descendants of families who live on the once-Mexican territory, Van Houtryve proves their existence within a dominant narrative that often ignores them. Using traditional nineteenth century photographic techniques, like wet plate glass negatives, the artist taps into the aesthetic of the 1800s…”

— Zachary Small in Hyperallergic

 

About the gallery

The baudoin lebon gallery was founded in 1976 in Paris. It is a leading dealer of Modern and Contemporary Art, including painting, sculpture and the most significant international photography. The gallery supports radically different works with an enlightened eclecticism.

 

Download the exhibition invitation PDF.

 

Blue Sky Days gallery exhibition 7 Sept. to 14 Oct. 2017

 

Galerija Vartai
Vilniaus g. 39
Vilnius
Lithuania
galerija@galerijavartai.lt
tel. +370.5.212.2949

 

Starting in 2013, I traveled across America to aerially photograph the kind of gatherings that have become habitual targets for drone strikes abroad — including weddings, funerals, and groups of people praying or exercising. I also flew my camera over settings where government surveillance drones have been used domestically.

In October 2012, a drone strike in northeast Pakistan killed a 67-year-old woman picking okra outside her home. At a U.S. Congressional hearing held in Washington in October 2013, the woman’s 13-year-old grandson, Zubair Rehman, spoke to a group of lawmakers. “I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”

The images captured from the drone’s perspective engage with the changing nature of surveillance, personal privacy, and war.

The production of Blue Sky Days was supported with grants from the Pulitzer Center, and was first published by Harper’s magazine as a 16-page spread, the largest photo essay in the magazine’s 166-year history.

 

---

Praise for Blue Sky Days

 

“Blue Sky Days is one of the most important photo essays done in the last few years. It tackles issues that are very difficult to photograph but central to modern existence — privacy, government intrusion and modern antiseptic warfare.”

 

- James Estrin, Editor of the The New York Times LENS blog

—

“With simple, vivid means, Houtryve brings the war home.”

– Teju Cole, Photography critic for The New York Times Magazine

—

“Conceptual in nature, grounded in metaphor, and presented in gorgeous black and white, his series Blue Sky Days sure looks like art.“

–  Jordan G. Teicher, critic for Photograph Magazine

---

Honors for Blue Sky Days

•  ICP Infinity Award
•  World Press Photo, Second Prize
•  Photographic Museum of Humanity, First Prize
•  TIME’s Top 10 Photos of 2014
•  Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant
•  Pulitzer Center Grant
•  Getty Grant

Blue Sky Days will be exhibited at the Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography in Dhaka from Feb. 3 to 16, 2017.

Chobi Mela IX Festival
Pathshala South Asian Media Institute
16 Sukrabad
Panthapath
Dhaka 1207
Bangladesh

About Blue Sky Days:

In October 2012, a drone strike in northeast Pakistan killed a 67-year-old woman picking okra outside her house. At a briefing held in 2013 in Washington, DC, the woman’s 13-year-old grandson, Zubair Rehman, spoke to a group of five lawmakers. “I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”

With my camera attached to a small drone, I traveled across America to photograph the very sorts of gatherings that have become habitual targets for foreign air strikes—weddings, funerals and groups of people praying or exercising. I also flew my camera over settings in which drones are used to less lethal effect, such as prisons, oil fields, and the US-Mexico border. The images captured from the drone’s perspective engage with the changing nature of surveillance, personal privacy and war.

. . .

Chobi Mela, the international festival of photography since its inception in 2000 has been the single biggest photography event in Asia and the first of a regular biennale, one that has become one of the highlights of the Asian calendar. It is organised by Drik Picture Library Ltd. and Pathshala South Asian Media Institute. The Ninth edition of Chobi Mela will be held from February 3rd to February 16th, 2017.

Blue Sky Days solo exhibition Oct. 4 to Nov. 23 prolonged to Dec. 31, 2016

Artist reception Thursday, Oct. 13 from 6:30 to 8:30pm

Anastasia Photo gallery
143 Ludlow Street,
New York City, NY 10002
USA

Starting in 2013, I traveled across America to aerially photograph the kind of gatherings that have become habitual targets for drone strikes abroad — including weddings, funerals, and groups of people praying or exercising. I also flew my camera over settings where government surveillance drones have been used domestically.

In October 2012, a drone strike in northeast Pakistan killed a 67-year-old woman picking okra outside her home. At a U.S. Congressional hearing held in Washington in October 2013, the woman’s 13-year-old grandson, Zubair Rehman, spoke to a group of lawmakers. “I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”

The images captured from the drone’s perspective engage with the changing nature of surveillance, personal privacy, and war.

The production of Blue Sky Days was supported with grants from the Pulitzer Center, and was first published by Harper’s magazine as a 16-page spread, the largest photo essay in the magazine’s 166-year history.

 

---

Praise for Blue Sky Days

 

“Blue Sky Days is one of the most important photo essays done in the last few years. It tackles issues that are very difficult to photograph but central to modern existence — privacy, government intrusion and modern antiseptic warfare.”

 

- James Estrin, Editor of the The New York Times LENS blog

—

“With simple, vivid means, Houtryve brings the war home.”

– Teju Cole, Photography critic for The New York Times Magazine

—

“Conceptual in nature, grounded in metaphor, and presented in gorgeous black and white, his series Blue Sky Days sure looks like art.“

–  Jordan G. Teicher, critic for Photograph Magazine

---

Honors for Blue Sky Days

•  ICP Infinity Award
•  World Press Photo, Second Prize
•  Photographic Museum of Humanity, First Prize
•  White House News Photographers Association, First Prize
•  POYi Award of Excellence
•  TIME’s Top 10 Photos of 2014
•  Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant
•  Pulitzer Center Grant
•  Getty Grant

 

 

Blue Sky Days solo exhibition 29 to 31 July, 2016

• LIVE Magazine talk on 29 July at 8:00pm

• Projection and artist talk on 31 July at 6:00pm

Les Ateliers de Couthures
Festival International du Journalisme Vivant
Couthures
France

In October 2012, a drone strike in northeast Pakistan killed a 67-year-old woman picking okra outside her house. At a briefing held in 2013 in Washington, DC, the woman’s 13-year-old grandson, Zubair Rehman, spoke to a group of five lawmakers. “I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”

With my camera attached to a small drone, I traveled across America to photograph the very sorts of gatherings that have become habitual targets for foreign air strikes—weddings, funerals and groups of people praying or exercising. I also flew my camera over settings in which drones are used to less lethal effect, such as prisons, oil fields, and the US-Mexico border. The images captured from the drone’s perspective engage with the changing nature of surveillance, personal privacy and war.

My Traces of Exile video installation is on exhibition at the C/O Berlin Foundation in Germany as part of the group exhibition SEND ME AN IMAGE – From Postcards to Social Media.

Open from 29 May to 2 September, 2021

C/O Berlin Foundation
Amerika Haus
Hardenbergstraße 22–24
10623 Berlin
Germany
Tel. +49 30 2844416 62
info@co-berlin.org

About Traces of Exile:

For the first time in its history, Europe experienced a refugee crisis where most of the individuals involved were connected to the internet. In 2015, over 1.3 million people fled to Europe from crises in the Middle East and North Africa. They carried smartphones to help them navigate through unknown territory and to communicate with loved ones left behind.

Some of them chose to document moments of their lives in exile and to publicly post their images on social media. Often, they geo-tagged their posts to the specific locations where they passed, leaving behind a digital trail of memories.

When I first viewed these posts, I immediately noticed a gap between how migrants portray themselves and how they are
portrayed in the media. Western narratives about the newcomers is fraught with politics, and news organisations tend to visually categorise migrants either as victims or threats. In contrast, the images the exiles post of themselves tend to be intimate, playful, and occasionally even flirtatious. According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of those who arrived in Europe in 2015 are men between the ages of 18 and 34. They express themselves with the same visual codes as other millennials. Though divided by borders and conflict, they are united with their generation across the globe by the unique photographic aesthetic of this historical moment.

In 2016, inspired by an Augmented Reality app that can see Instagram posts linked to a specific place, I followed this trail of digital traces through Europe, capturing landscapes of exile overlaid with the Instagram photos the refugees posted in the same place. The result is a series of snapshots of the refugee crisis in Europe, capturing the intersections of reality and online identities.

 

About SEND ME AN IMAGE – From Postcards to Social Media:

Photography has always been a social medium that has been shared with others. But why do people communicate with each other using images? And how do the “virtual distillates” of photographs change society? The thematic exhibition Send me an Image, From Postcards to Social Media outlines the development of photography from a means of communication in the nineteenth century to its current digital representation online. The focus is on the dialogue between historical forms of traveling images from photography over the past 150 years and contemporary artists from the 1970s onwards who work with both traditional and modern photographic techniques, uses, and means of communication.

The exhibition considers the transformation of photography from an illustrative medium to one of society’s most significant means of communicating today. At the same time, the works shown illuminate phenomena such as censorship, surveillance, and the algorithmic regulation that affect many activities in a data-driven era. Today, images shared via social media not only spread rapidly but can also take on an independent newsworthiness and as “pure” messages can even spark different kinds of protests. The social dimensions of image communication is a second area of focus in Send me an Image – From Postcards to Social Media at C/O Berlin, curated by Felix Hoffmann and Dr. Kathrin Schönegg.

Participating artists:

ABC Artists’ Books Cooperative, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin with Der Greif, David Campany & Anastasia Samoylova, Fredi Casco, Moyra Davey, Themistokles von Eckenbrecher, Martin Fengel & Jörg Koopmann, Stuart Franklin, Gilbert & George, Dieter Hacker, Tomas van Houtryve, Philippe Kahn, On Kawara, Erik Kessels, Marc Lee, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mike Mandel, Theresa Martinat, Eva & Franco Mattes, Jonas Meyer & Christin Müller, Peter Miller, Romain Roucoules, Thomas Ruff, Taryn Simon & Aaron Swartz, Andreas Slominski, Clare Strand, Corinne Vionnet.

Exhibition catalogue available from Steidl publishing.

Divided, my 2018 video installation about the Mexico-U.S. border will be on display at the Annenberg Center for Photography as part of the group exhibition WALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine from October 5 to December 29, 2019.

Annenberg Space for Photography
2000 Avenue of the Stars
Los Angeles, CA 90067
USA

 

About Divided

Since Baja and Alta California were divided by the seizure of Mexican land by the United States military in 1848, a political boundary has jutted into the Pacific Ocean. Over the years, the border has been reinforced from a simple line to a fence to steel barrier. This single-channel video installation focuses on the timeless repetition of lines of waves as they crash perpendicular into the barrier. The collision of waves is mesmerizing, and we notice unified lines of waves that are divided in two.

 

Preview video of Divided

 

About the exhibition

Complex, challenging, and immersive, WALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine is a historical look at civilization’s relationship with barriers, both real and imagined. For centuries, across diverse civilizations, walls have been central to human history. This exhibit explores the various aspects of walls – artistic, social, political, and historical – in six sections: Delineation, Defense, Deterrent, The Divine, Decoration, and The Invisible. These categories overlap and change meaning according to context, much like the walls themselves: erected for one reason, their appearance and use is then altered and modified over centuries, reflecting the civilizations that have grown and changed around them.

Featuring over 70 artists and photographers, WALLS invites guests to contemplate how these structures – from the decorative to the divine – affect the human psyche and why we keep building them.

 

---

Praise for Divided

“This work took a very simple concept, a border wall between two countries, and visually infused it with all the complexities of the contemporary American debate. The ‘moving picture’ that tells this story, does so in a leisurely way, but clearly one that was thought out and executed with the utmost care and attention to detail. The ‘reveal’, at the end, lingers in your mind.”

– Keith Jenkins, Director of Visual Journalism, NPR; Juror of the 2018 Producer’s Choice Award from CENTER Santa Fe.

 

“Van Houtryve filmed a short video from above the wall’s end, entitled Divided (2018), which seems almost meditative.”

– Jacqui Palumbo, Visual Culture Editor, Artsy /

Selected as a finalist for the 2019 Leica Oskar Barnack Award, seventeen prints of Lines and Lineage will be exhibited in Berlin with the other finalists from 25 September to 25 October 2019

 

Neue Schule für Fotografie
Brunnenstraße 188-190
10119 Berlin

 

About the work

Lines and Lineage takes aim at America’s collective amnesia of history. The work addresses the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, I chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. Portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—are paired with photographs of landscapes inside the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Lines and Lineage lifts the pervasive fog of dominant Western mythology and makes us question the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West. The work will be published as a monograph by Radius Books in Autumn 2019.

 

About the Award

The Leica Oskar Barnack Award honors “professional photographers whose unerring powers of observation capture and express the relationship between man and the environment in the most graphic form.” It is named after Oskar Barnack, the inventor of the Leica camera, and it has been awarded since 1979. Previous winners include Martin Kollar, Guy Tillim, Andrea Hoyer, Luc Delahaye, Claudine Doury, Larry Towell, Eugene Richards and Sebastiao Salgado. My series, Behind the Curtains, was also chosen as LOBA finalist in 2011. For the 2019 award, the members of the jury were Karin Rehn-Kaufmann, Max Pinckers, Milena Carstens, Enrico Stefanelli and Steve McCurry.

 

Reviews and praise for Lines and Lineage

“…Using a North American map from 1839 (the same year that photography is thought to have made its debut in Europe), Mr. van Houtryve traveled along Mexico’s old northern border to meet families who have lived in the region for centuries.

His equipment in the Instagram age? A 19th-century camera he found in a Paris antique shop. He stocked up on the glass plates and pungent potions needed for the wet-collodion process, a technique invented in 1851. Doing so, Mr. van Houtryve conjures what the West may have looked like in the Mexican era…”

— Simon Romero in The New York Times

 

“His portraits are carefully researched and historically relevant – all of his subjects are descendants of the area’s original Mexican inhabitants. Quiet and dignified, the images pay tribute to Nadar, whose powerful portraits Van Houtryve admires. He focuses on his subjects’ eyes, conveying a sense of their interior life. He presents the work in diptychs that juxtapose portraits with romantic landscapes, reflecting an intimate connection between humans and nature…”

— Elisabeth Biondi in Photograph Magazine

 

“…Photographing the descendants of families who live on the once-Mexican territory, Van Houtryve proves their existence within a dominant narrative that often ignores them. Using traditional nineteenth century photographic techniques, like wet plate glass negatives, the artist taps into the aesthetic of the 1800s…”

— Zachary Small in Hyperallergic

 

Artist interview video

 

Lines and Lineage exhibition for the winners of the Roger Pic Award, from 11 June to 25 October, 2019

Galerie de LaSCAM
Société civile des auteurs multimédia
5 avenue Vélasquez
75008 Paris
France

About the work

Lines and Lineage takes aim at America’s collective amnesia of history. The work addresses the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, I chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. Portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—are paired with photographs of landscapes inside the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Lines and Lineage lifts the pervasive fog of dominant Western mythology and makes us question the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West.

 

About the exhibition and award

Each year, la Société civile des auteurs multimédia (La SCAM), awards a photographic portfolio documenting reality and questioning our humanity with singularity. The award is in memory of Roger Pic, a French photographer, director and defender of copyright. For the 27th edition of the award, there was a tie, and the jury selected two award winners, Tomas van Houtryve for Lines and Lineage and Denis Dailleux for his series ln Ghana – We shall meet again. An honorable mention was also given to Laetitia Vançon for her portolio, At the end of the day. The members of of the jury were Florence Drouhet, Fabienne Pavia, Thierry Ledoux, Gérard Uféras, Bénédicte Van der Maar and Guy Seligmann.

Six gelatin silver prints from my Lines and Lineage series are on display in the group exhibition, Sanctuary: Building a House Without Walls, in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City from February 14 to June 30, 2019.

The Cathedral Church of
Saint John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Avenue
at 112th Street
New York, NY 10025
USA

 

About Lines and Lineage

We often forget that the boundary between Mexico and the United States was not always where it is today. It used to be 1100 kilometers farther north, following what is now the state line between Oregon and California and running east to Wyoming before zagging southeast to Louisiana. Originally home to the indigenous peoples of the region, much of this land was Spanish and then Mexican territory for centuries before becoming what we now think of as the American West.

Spanish colonists and missionaries settled here beginning in 1598. In 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain, and by the middle of the century, it was in some ways far more advanced than its neighbor to the northeast. It abolished slavery shortly after independence; black Mexicans soon gained prominent positions, including the governorship of California. Indigenous people were given the right to vote. All this came to an end in 1848, when the United States attacked Mexico, seized half its land, and created the border that we know today.

At the time, the war on Mexico was emphatically opposed by prominent Americans, including Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams. Henry David Thoreau penned his groundbreaking essay on Civil Disobedience after his arrest for nonpayment of taxes, an act of defiance of what he called an “unjust” war that aimed to “expand the slave territory.”

Mexican administration was cut short before photographic technology, revealed in Paris in 1839, arrived in the region. The well-known visual record of the American West—dominated by photos of cowboys and white settlers, the Gold Rush and the arrival of the railroads—was created after 1848. Images from the Mexican era, on the other hand, were never fixed in our memory. Using glass plates and a nineteenth-century camera to photograph landscapes along the original border and create portraits of descendants of early inhabitants, this project imagines what that history might look like. It questions the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West.

 

About Sanctuary: Building a House Without Walls

The  group show focuses on the right to shelter, and beyond that, an exploration of what shelter and sanctuary mean in a world divided by sectarian discord, cultural migration, and ongoing refugee crises. Participating artists include Louise Bourgeois, Alicia Eggert, For Freedoms, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Hine, John Moore, Tomas van Houtryve, and Alisha Wormsley.

Divided, my 2018 video installation about the Mexico-U.S. border will be on display at MoCP, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography as part of the Stateless: Views of Global Migration group exhibition from January 24, to March 31, 2019.

Museum of Contemporary Photography
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605
USA

It will also be exhibited at Turchin Center for the Visual Arts from 7 December, 2018 to 27 April, 2019.

Turchin Center for the Visual Arts
423 West King St.
Boone, NC 28608
USA

 

About Divided

Since Baja and Alta California were divided by the seizure of Mexican land by the United States military in 1848, a political boundary has jutted into the Pacific Ocean. Over the years, the border has been reinforced from a simple line to a fence to steel barrier. This single-channel video installation focuses on the timeless repetition of lines of waves as they crash perpendicular into the barrier. The collision of waves is mesmerizing, and we notice unified lines of waves that are divided in two.

 

Preview video of Divided

 

 

About Stateless: Views of Global Migration

While global migration has existed for tens of thousands of years, we are currently facing an unprecedentedly vast movement of people across borders. According to the UN Refugee Agency, 68.5 million people were displaced in 2018, and of that number, 25.4 million have been designated as refugees, 10 million have been left stateless, and fewer than 105,000 have been resettled. 44,400 people each day are forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution. Stateless: Views of Global Migrationseeks to humanize this stark data, providing an alternative visual landscape to the imagery typically associated with the current wave of global migration. Through the individual lenses of eight contemporary artists, this exhibition lays bare the contradictions inherent to the crisis, finding beauty and strength in the face of collective trauma. These powerful works of art bear witness, contemplate memory, and explore one’s connectivity to a place, even when one can no longer return. Organized by the MoCP’s executive director Natasha Egan, Stateless: Views of Global Migration addresses the individual stories that define this global human crisis.

Artists featured in the exhibition include Tomas van Houtryve, Bissane Al Charif, Daniel Castro Garcia, Leila Alaoui, Shimon Attie, Omar Imam, Fidencio Fifield-Perez, and Hiwa K.

 

---

Praise for Divided

“This work took a very simple concept, a border wall between two countries, and visually infused it with all the complexities of the contemporary American debate. The ‘moving picture’ that tells this story, does so in a leisurely way, but clearly one that was thought out and executed with the utmost care and attention to detail. The ‘reveal’, at the end, lingers in your mind.”

– Keith Jenkins, Director of Visual Journalism, NPR; Juror of the 2018 Producer’s Choice Award from CENTER Santa Fe.

 

“Van Houtryve filmed a short video from above the wall’s end, entitled Divided (2018), which seems almost meditative.”

– Jacqui Palumbo, Visual Culture Editor, Artsy / New York

 

Lines and Lineage gelatin silver prints will be on display inside the Baudoin Lebon gallery stand (D02) at Paris Photo, November 8-11, 2018.

Paris Photo
Grand Palais
Paris
France

• Paris Photo is the largest international art fair dedicated to the photographic medium and is held each November at the historic Grand Palais in Paris.

• The Baudoin Lebon Gallery was founded in 1976 in Paris. It is a leading dealer of Modern and Contemporary Art, including painting, sculpture and the most significant international photography. The gallery supports radically different works with an enlightened eclecticism.

About Lines and Lineage

We often forget that the boundary between Mexico and the United States was not always where it is today. It used to be 1100 kilometers farther north, following what is now the state line between Oregon and California and running east to Wyoming before zagging southeast to Louisiana. Originally home to the indigenous peoples of the region, much of this land was Spanish and then Mexican territory for centuries before becoming what we now think of as the American West.

Spanish colonists and missionaries settled here beginning in 1598. In 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain, and by the middle of the century, it was in some ways far more advanced than its neighbor to the northeast. It abolished slavery shortly after independence; black Mexicans soon gained prominent positions, including the governorship of California. Indigenous people were given the right to vote. All this came to an end in 1848, when the United States attacked Mexico, seized half its land, and created the border that we know today.

At the time, the war on Mexico was emphatically opposed by prominent Americans, including Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams. Henry David Thoreau penned his groundbreaking essay on Civil Disobedience after his arrest for nonpayment of taxes, an act of defiance of what he called an “unjust” war that aimed to “expand the slave territory.”

Mexican administration was cut short before photographic technology, revealed in Paris in 1839, arrived in the region. The well-known visual record of the American West—dominated by photos of cowboys and white settlers, the Gold Rush and the arrival of the railroads—was created after 1848. Images from the Mexican era, on the other hand, were never fixed in our memory. Using glass plates and a nineteenth-century camera to photograph landscapes along the original border and create portraits of descendants of early inhabitants, this project imagines what that history might look like. It questions the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West.

Blue Sky Days gallery exhibition 13 October to 1 December 2018.

A large selection of 150 x 100 cm gelatin silver prints from the Blue Sky Days series will be shown in tandem with images from Sebastian Van Malleghem’s Nordic Noir project in the beautiful new location of Albus Lux.

Albus Lux Contemporary
Plantagebaan 232, 4725 AG
Wouwse Plantage
The Netherlands

About Blue Sky Days

Starting in 2013, I traveled across America to aerially photograph the kind of gatherings that have become habitual targets for drone strikes abroad — including weddings, funerals, and groups of people praying or exercising. I also flew my camera over settings where government surveillance drones have been used domestically.

In October 2012, a drone strike in northeast Pakistan killed a 67-year-old woman picking okra outside her home. At a U.S. Congressional hearing held in Washington in October 2013, the woman’s 13-year-old grandson, Zubair Rehman, spoke to a group of lawmakers. “I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”

The images captured from the drone’s perspective engage with the changing nature of surveillance, personal privacy, and war.

The production of Blue Sky Days was supported with grants from the Pulitzer Center, and was first published by Harper’s magazine as a 16-page spread, the largest photo essay in the magazine’s 166-year history.

 

Three 100x66cm gelatin silver prints from my Blue Sky Days series are featured in the IconoBelge group exhibition from 24 June to 30 September, 2018.

AntwerpPhoto
Loodswezen building
Antwerp
Belgium

The exhibition showcases iconic work by more than 30 Belgian photographers, also including Carl De Keyzer, Bieke Depoorter, Stephan Vanfleteren, Katrien De Blauwer, and Sébastien Van Malleghem. The show is curated by Kaat Celis.

 

About Blue Sky Days

In October 2012, a drone strike in northeast Pakistan killed a 67-year-old woman picking okra outside her house. At a briefing held in 2013 in Washington, DC, the woman’s 13-year-old grandson, Zubair Rehman, spoke to a group of five lawmakers. “I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”

With my camera attached to a small drone, I traveled across America to photograph the very sorts of gatherings that have become habitual targets for foreign air strikes—weddings, funerals and groups of people praying or exercising. I also flew my camera over settings in which drones are used to less lethal effect, such as prisons, oil fields, and the US-Mexico border. The images captured from the drone’s perspective engage with the changing nature of surveillance, personal privacy and war.