Puck Soetens Dutch, b. 1970

Puck Soetens lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands. In 2014 she completed her education at the Fotoacademie in Rotterdam. 

In a world where digital perfection is increasingly becoming the norm, Puck returns with “Portraits of a Flower” & “Portraits of the Sea” to the pure, the transient, and the wonderfully real. These fairy-tale-like series are an ode to the timeless beauty and identity of the flower and the sea. What once began as a career in portrait photography has, over the past few years, transformed into a much freer and more intuitive form of image-making. She has devoted herself entirely to fine art photography.

Whereas Puck was previously convinced of a future in black-and-white photography, due to its rawness, mystery, and timelessness, color has gradually and undeniably taken center stage. For her, color is not a given, but a personal experience for everyone. When the color is right, the image feels convincing to her, regardless of any explicit narrative. She brings her work together under the overarching title “If Only I Could Paint.” Within this framework, she explores how photography can relate to painting and drawing. Not by imitating existing styles, but by re-examining materiality, the play of light, and sensory experience. In this process, she works with opposites such as stillness and movement, day and night, positive and negative. At the same time, her work remains rooted in the everyday and the immediate.

Her subjects emerge from an environment she knows inside and out: the forest where she has been walking for twenty-five years, the beach to which she returns time and again, and the home studio where Puck has been working for twenty years. It is precisely through this repetition that she forces herself to look anew each time and rediscover the familiar.