Katrien de
Blauwer

PHOTOGRAPHER WITHOUT A CAMERA

COLLAGE

Katrien de Blauwer is a Belgian collage artist born in 1969 in the small provincial town of Ronse, Belgium. She calls herself a "photographer without a camera," creating collages with appropriated photographic images cut from a vast collection of vintage magazines and papers. After a troubled childhood, she moved to Ghent to study painting, then attended the Royal Academy in Antwerp to study fashion, which she abandoned. It was during her fashion studies that she made her first collage books as moodboards for fashion collections. She began collecting, cutting, and recycling images as therapeutic self-investigation, describing her process as "visiting a therapist." Her work is simultaneously intimate and anonymous, using found images and body parts that have been cut away to create a universalization where personal history becomes everyone's history. Through her collages, she explores themes of identity, femininity, and sexuality while deconstructing and reassembling mid-20th century imagery to comment on the depiction of women and cultivate different narratives entirely.