Jenny Boot

Jenny Boot started her career as a painter, before attending the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam and becoming a portrait photographer. Through photography, she was able to push her vision even more, without having to renounce painting. For with their dark backgrounds and stark lighting, her photographs clearly lean towards portrait painting techniques. The Dutch artist mainly portrays women and she is ostensibly primarily interested in revealing their complex power and sensuality. To this end, Boot sees light as the most important tool, because it can completely change the tone of an image. For her, no matter how good the idea or how beautiful the model is, a photograph is created by light. It allows the photographer to capture her models in picturesque images.

works

Often hailed as a surrealist photographer, Jenny Boot focuses on creating extreme intimacy. The theatrical and provocative nature of her photographs makes for fascinating interpretations of her subjects – regularly women of colour who are mostly absent from (art) history. Boot puts them in the spotlight, wrapped in iconography, and full of human dignity, powerful emotions and hope. With her masterful use of various lighting techniques, the artist models the sensibility of the women, who have no qualms about exposing themselves – despite it all. In addition, Boot unveils a dark, ominous but often titillating world in a picturesque décor. She employs various styles, although there is also a constant in her work: her portraits are all majestic in nature. She mixes the classical with the modern. She reinterprets the traditional and works within the framework of a kind of timeless aesthetic. That is precisely why you can keep gazing at her work, endlessly, and marvel at it.