Awoiska van der Molen

Van der Molen studied architecture and design at Academie Minerva in Groningen, Netherlands, then photography both there and at Hunter College, City University of New York, New York City.[1][2] In 2003 she gained an MFA in photography at Academy of Art and Design St. Joost in Breda, Netherlands.[1]

Between 2000 and 2003, van der Molen made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria.[3] After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city.[3] Since 2009, she has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work.[3][4][5] She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom.[4][5] Van der Molen's first book, Sequester (2014), "photographed throughout the whole of Europe"[6] including the volcanic Canary Islands,[5] contains monochromatic "landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey".[7] Blanco (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees. The Living Mountain (2020) is "a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit."[8] Sean O'Hagan and Jörg Colberg have praised the quality of her prints.[5][7]

• Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam: 4 prints (as of November 2020)[13]
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London: a set of 8 collotype prints (as of November 2020)[14]

• 2014: Grand Prize, Hariban Award, Benrido Collotype Atelier, Kyoto, Japan[5][15]
• 2017: Larry Sultan Photography Award, Pier 24 Photography and McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, Califnrnia[16]
• 2017: Shortlisted, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, London, for her exhibition Blanco at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam[17]
• 2019: Shortlisted, Prix Pictet, Geneva[18][19][20]

• Official website