My work, underlaying vision:

My work explores the elusiveness of things: a deeper reality that resists capture yet insists on presence. Central to my practice is the sequence, which allows the unseen moments between frames to emerge as entry points into the unknown. It is in these in-between moments, rather than in isolated images, that presence asserts itself and meaning begins to take shape.

The true challenge for me lies in accepting uncertainty, approaching the unknown not as a void but as a liminal space in flux – an active field of becoming where transformation, ambiguity and desire can arise. Sequences lend my images a cinematic quality that resists the illusion of a single truth, stretching time and inviting the viewer to consider the quiet intervals. Like silences in music, they destabilise the fixed and allow longing to shape both subject and perception. 

Portraits:

My portraits and staged images cultivate this tension deliberately. Though rooted in a documentary tradition, they inhabit the space between reality and construction, clarity and obscurity. Through angle and framing, subjects often assume an androgynous presence, becoming embodiments of the liminal space the sequences expose. Desire is my method of looking: it guides what is captured and what remains elusive. In both landscape and portraiture, images do not conclude but gesture. Towards ambiguity, towards possibility, towards the unknown. 

Engagement:

Coen Dekkers built his first camera as a child. This early act of curiosity foreshadowed a lifelong engagement with both the mechanics and metaphysics of image-making. Entirely self-taught, he has worked with analogue and digital processes, including extensive work with the Hasselblad system. Parallel to his photographic practice, he has spent decades teaching industrial design. He regards photography as an open space, a counterpoint to the rigid systems of design that once defined his professional world and  a way to move beyond constraint into a medium where structure gives way to perception. His photographic language is one of intuition and presence, ambiguity and desire. A devoted reader of Thomas Mann, he regards photography as an architecture of consciousness, a liminal field of longing and transformation. Coen Dekkers lives and works in The Hague. 

Exhibitions:

2022: The Moment In-between, solo exhibition, Kadmium, Delft (NL) ➝

2012: Ataque, group exhibition, Kadmium, Delft (NL)

2011: Sequential Portraits, solo exhibition, Kadmium, Delft (NL)

2009: The Man Habitat, group exhibition, Kadmium, Delft (NL)

2003: Recent Portraits, solo exhibition, O’dart, Delft (NL)

2001: Grasp from recent photo works, Gallery Gravensteen, Haarlem

1997: Portraits, solo exhibition, TNO Apeldoorn (NL)