Thursday 6 December 2012

Sylvie Zijlmans























Smoke, flooding, menace and mystery - all part of the work of Dutch photographer Sylvie Zijlmans and her husband and sometime-collaborator Hewald Jongenelis. Destroying sets and drenching her models, Zijlmans creates large scale environments in which she can experiment, capturing the consequences with technical precision. The resulting images are often shown as huge backlit transparencies, dwarfing the viewer and showing the destruction in minute detail. She also creates more intimate, strange series using her family, the sequence with her son and husband wearing many layers of suiting being both playful and disconcerting, since her son is reduced to tears by the experience in one shot. Demanding parents eh?