Alex Timmermans is a Dutch photographer whose work brings together one of photography’s earliest processes with a distinctly contemporary imagination.
Born in the Netherlands in 1962, Timmermans is a self-taught photographer who developed an early fascination with analogue photography. After working with both film and digital cameras, he found the predictability of digital photography increasingly removed from the sense of discovery that had originally attracted him to the medium.
His return to analogue photography eventually led him to the wet plate collodion process, a technique developed in the 1850s by Frederick Scott Archer. The process transformed his practice and became fundamental to his artistic language.
Timmermans works with antique wooden cameras and historic brass lenses, including Petzval-type lenses dating from the 19th century. Each photograph begins with a glass plate that must be individually prepared with collodion and sensitised immediately before exposure. The plate is then exposed, developed, washed, fixed and varnished by hand.
The entire process has to take place while the plate remains wet, making timing, chemistry, temperature and weather part of the photographic result. When working on location, Timmermans travels with his equipment, chemicals and a mobile darkroom.
This element of uncertainty is central to his work. Rather than attempting to eliminate imperfections, Timmermans allows the physical characteristics of the process to become part of each image.
His best-known body of work, Storytelling, combines this historic technique with carefully staged and often surreal scenes. Characters appear in unexpected situations, suspended between reality and imagination. The photographs can feel theatrical, poetic and humorous at the same time, often resembling fragments from an unknown story or a single frame from an imaginary film.
Timmermans constructs many of the scenes and props himself and searches carefully for locations, light and atmosphere before creating the final photograph. Despite the elaborate preparation, the actual image is made directly through the camera and wet plate process rather than constructed digitally afterwards.
His work has been exhibited internationally at galleries, photography festivals and art fairs including Paris Photo Los Angeles, PAN Amsterdam, KunstRAI, Photo Shanghai and exhibitions in Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam and elsewhere.
Through his combination of historical technique and surreal storytelling, Alex Timmermans has created a photographic language that feels simultaneously rooted in the origins of photography and entirely his own.
