Henri Blommers is a fine-art photographer from Amsterdam who works both analog and digital and uses stitching, collage, and other techniques in his practice. He manipulates film with chemicals and botanical ingredients during different stages. He creates a refuge to an otherworldly dimension full of bright colors based on contemporary socially engaged or environmental themes such as the impact of plastics, sea level rise, biodiversity loss, and digital influences on our lives. The substantiation of these themes on the medium (canvas, print, film) is the basis of his working process.
Coming from a working-class background, his love for photography began growing during his military service and a subsequent long journey to detach from his small-town family background. After a career in IT, he switched to photography after graduating from the Amsterdam Fotoacademie in 2010.
His work has been widely published and exhibited internationally in recent years. Last year, he won the Denis Roussel award for alternative processes in analog photography, and he collaborated with residents, governments, and farmers during an artist in residency in Switzerland. The dozens of analog images were exhibited outdoors in the forest at his request.
Through his poetic and aesthetic images, he tries to involve the biggest possible audience in complex contemporary themes. He prefers to exhibit outdoors or in non-standard places where he can reach individuals outside the art world. One of the reasons why he cooperates with the French organization Arterritoires.
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Henri has been the image editor of Hello Gorgeous, a magazine that has been fighting the stigmatization of HIV since its inception. In 2022, he curated the imaging of eight exhibitions on 40 years of HIV in collaboration with representatives from the transgender, LGBTQI+, black queer, and drug communities. Besides his commitment to activist causes, Henri is part of the artist collective BISH with artists from other disciplines. Living without a permanent home for five years since his divorce, he started @gardenofhenri during the pandemic when he got stuck on his allotment.
