Coen Dekkers is a conceptual photographer working across portraiture and street photography. Central to his practice is his use of sequences, a methodology he has developed over many years. Intimacy and anonymity, both manifest and assumed, permeate his explorations into the elusiveness of representation and the persistence of a deeper stratum of reality - one that resists capture yet insists on presence. He considers the unseen moments between frames entry-points into this unknown; it is through these in-between moments, rather than in isolated images, that presence asserts itself and meaning begins to take shape.
He regards the sequence as resistant to a fixed truth. Rather than treating this uncertainty as absence, it becomes a generative, liminal field in flux. Time folds, superposes and dilates, and attention expands into awareness of the intervals. Like silences in music, these spaces destabilise what appears fixed, allowing becoming to contour both subject and perception.
His portraits and street photographs cultivate this tension deliberately. They inhabit the space between sensory reality and construction, clarity and obscurity. Through angle, framing and a sensitivity to gesture, his portrait subjects frequently assume an androgynous presence, embodying the sequence’s liminal nature. Desire is his way of seeing. It guides what is captured and what is withheld. As much about presence as open narrative, his images do not conclude but gesture. Towards ambiguity, towards possibility; always relational to the unseen state between frames.
Coen Dekkers built his first camera as a child and has been photographing ever since. Formally trained in industrial design, photography is his open space: a counterpoint to the systemic, and where rigidity gives way to perception, intuition and desire. He is a devoted reader of Thomas Mann and regards photography as an architecture of consciousness.
