About
Vera van Almen is a Dutch artist born in 1986. based in
’s-Hertogenbosch, in the south of the Netherlands. She graduated at the Photo Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2017. While studying photography, she started experimenting more and more with photography, pushing the boundaries of the medium. Her digital camera was soon exchanged for an analogue camera, supplemented by an old-fashioned Polaroid camera. This became her favourite. She discovered the charm of allowing chance and the imperfections that come with it. The urge to experiment remained and soon she started trying out different printing techniques in the darkroom, which proved to be a pivotal moment in her artistic journey. Having to act physically to achieve images became a necessity in her process. She has since abandoned the camera entirely and now creates her images camera-less.
Artist statement
My practice explores the tension between absence and presence, the visible and the unknowable. Working without a camera and outside traditional photographic conventions, I invite contingency, chance, and failure into the image-making process. By embracing the unknown and uncontrollable within my practice, I relinquish control over the final outcome. This creates a sense of freedom to create and diminishes the fear of failure. In a way, working with uncertainty becomes both a method and a coping mechanism, transforming anxiety into possibility.
Rather than offering clear narratives, my work creates space for ambiguity. Images emerge as abstract traces: ephemeral, untethered from fixed meaning. They ask questions of perception, memory, and existence itself.
In an era defined by clarity, resolution, and certainty, I turn toward the incomplete. The impermanent. The barely visible. I aim to evoke a felt experience — where seeing and feeling blur, and the viewer is drawn into the quiet spaces between knowing and not-knowing.
My work is an invitation: to slow down, to reflect, and to inhabit the uncertain — a space where beauty, resonance, and connection can emerge.
Longing
for a place
you have never been
Longing
for a time
you do not know
Coming home
to a place
you have never been
Feeling akin
to somenone
you do not know
Losing
an other me
Feeling nothing
is that feeling something?
I did not know
that nothing
can be everything
Text by Vera van Almen