"I take most pictures when I'm not photographing. It's in the subconscious."
Neeltje de Vries' black-and-white photographs are probing. They seduce, they disrupt, and they hold you in their grip. In one image, the curve of a breast touches the hard edge of a wall; in another, a woman's tongue strokes the shoulder of another. But make no mistake: these are not merely beautiful, seductive images. They tingle with friction. De Vries’ work is a masterful balance of line and form, body and boundary, allure and discomfort.
Born in Istanbul in 1976, de Vries' path to photography was anything but straightforward. She left Turkey with her Dutch mother when she was still a toddler, worked as a graphic designer for twenty years, and only returned to her first love, photography, in her mid-thirties. At the age of 36, she enrolled at the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam, where she finally devoted herself fully to a medium she had studied years earlier but had abandoned. Now, as a full-time photographer, her work has attracted the attention of galleries at home and abroad, and even the renowned Phillips auction house in London, finding its way into numerous collections in recent years.
What sets Neeltje de Vries apart is her uniqueness. These are self-portraits in disguise, women who embody the freedom she could once only imagine. Now, through photography, she appropriates that space for herself. Her background in graphic design sharpens each composition and increases the emotional weight. These women are not there for us. They exist for themselves, they feel their own boundaries, explore their own freedoms.
In de Vries' world, nudity is not about eroticism but about liberation. Although she leaves room for interpretation, her work resists categorization. She is not interested in creating “beautiful” images of naked women, but in capturing the power of free women who refuse to be anything other than themselves.
Her images exude quiet resistance, balancing on the edge of equilibrium, and carry an underlying tension that lingers long after your gaze has wandered away.