The pain of being excluded might strengthen the growth of wings with which to fly your own course. This young adult girl is now often praised for her natural beauty, but these compliments sometimes trigger old traumas. The beauty of red and the charm of a freckled face is not something usually appreciated by other children. Year after year, in primary school, she had to endure childish pestering. It made her feel ill at ease about who she was and how she looked, keeping her insecurity and grief to herself. Now the time has come to let go of quiet acceptance, to share her sorrows, to connect with the wider world, to highlight her hues of red against the grey of a troubled past.
Flokje van Lith (The Netherlands, 1969) studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. For many years Van Lith worked as a portrait photographer commissioned by both companies and private clients. Since 2011 she focuses more on her independent work. After having completed her first autonomous series in 2011, it got selected immediately for the prestigious Photo Festival Naarden, soon after which participation in international exhibitions and art fairs followed. Van Lith's portraits of a subdued mood depict universal emotive states such as sorrow, solitude and melancholy and act as counterweight to our turbulent times. Inspired by personal childhood memories and temporary muses whom she encounters by chance, her images allude to the kind of parallel worlds young women can inhabit. In one telling reminiscence of childhood, Van Lith is playing a secret self-invented game in which she buries her dolls and fantasizes that being under ground opens doors to parallel universes. These imagined parallel worlds are part of what she recreates in her contemporary portraiture. Aside from childhood memories, Van Lith finds inspiration in the formal qualities and emotional substance of the portraits done by Flemish Primitives and Italian Renaissance masters. Photographing her muses and backgrounds in interior settings allows Van Lith to take full advantage of the incidence of light and of chiaroscuro. She uses a medium-format camera for its ability to record in great detail. During post-production she continues to labor over images for weeks and often months on end, until she arrives at the perfect marriage of models and the carefully chosen environments of decay. In short, her work can be characterized as painting with photography.
Awards International Color Awards 2016: 4 x Nominee, Category Fine-Art, Portrait, 1 x Honorable mention, Category Portrait.
International Photography Awards 2016: 3 x Honorable mention, Category Portrait, Fine Art.
International Kontinent Awards 2015: Third Place, Single Image, Fine Art.
International Photography Awards 2015: 8 x Honorable mention, Category Fine Art, Portrait, People.
Fine Art Photo Awards 2015: Professional Nominee, Category Portrait.
International Color Awards 2015: 8 x Honorable Mention, Category Fine Art, Portrait.
PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris 2014: Silver, Category Collage, Fine Art.
International Photography Award 2014: Second Prize, Category Portrait.
International Photography Award 2014: 8 x Honorable Mention, Category Portrait, Fine Art.
International Photography Award 2013, award: 3 x Honorable Mention, Category Portrait, Fine Art.
International Color Awards 2012, 2 x Nominee, Category Portrait, 2 x Honorable Mention, Category Portrait.
International Photography Award 2011, award: 1 x Honorable Mention, Category Portrait.
