Justine Tjallinks is one of the main photographers on the emerging Dutch scene. The photographer was the artistic director of the Netherlands “L’Officiel” magazine. Settled in Amsterdam where she studied at the “Fashion Institude”, Tjallinks grew up in Warnsveld in the East of Holland. Letting herself follow her aesthetic desires, the photographer invented a world of images where she revisited certain standards of Flemish painting, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon and Jean-Baptiste Greuze all while cultivating strange emotions within the shots.
The photographer was a big dreamer in her youth. At the moment when the dreams generally fade, hers grew, and she felt the need to turn them into images. Extremely talented, the artist brilliantly succeeded academically; however, the only matter that motivated her was the one which mattered least to her family circle: fine arts. This is why Tjallinks very quickly wanted to leave her village for Amsterdam (while dreaming of spending her vacations in New York). “All the pieces of my dreams would fit into the place where I was going. But this wasn’t the case,” remember Justine who in less than ten years would find her place as a creator. The artist does not hide her ambitions: “I’m delighted to have achieved things, and I hope to still accomplish more. But I believe I can say that where I am now is where I wanted to be since I was a kid.”
Influenced by Tim Walker, Erwin Olaf, Vivianne Sassen, Kasia Bielska and Jill Greenberg, the artist plays with light without trying to imitate styles, cultivating her own language. The artist puts her subjects in strange positions, forming dream-like images of unlimited duration. She bases her work on a sentence of Baudelaire in L’Art Romantique, “The beautiful is always strange.” Her work is a combination of a lot of photographic influences. Fine arts, contemporary art, fashion and beauty accessories are all stakeholders. Justine Tjallinks almost always functions in a conceptual manner to add a supplementary signifigance to her photographs.
The photographer cultivates a fascination for imperfection (something absent in her photos). She is fond of little hiccups in nature. For example, albinism. “Have you ever seen an albino crocodile or lion? I don’t believe there’s anything more beautiful,” said Tjallinks, who was honored to be able to photograph the beautiful Dutch albino woman, Miriam ( one can see in her series Nude).
Justine Tjallinks had to work nights and weekends on her photographs by installing an improvised studio in her living room. Now opting to work part-time as artistic director, the designer hopes that beginning next year she will be able to live solely of her photographic career. An unknown world where all that has vanished reappears over time. End and beginning, outside and inside coexist, as does the superimposed and present, where, in one same vibration, nudity becomes the concentration point.
In the work, everything relentlessly begins or begins again. The subject is sometimes white and (almost) nude, but sometimes also underlined with a discreet, ironic monstrosity, as if the artist maintained an immense reverence and an astonishing mockery in her work.
