Marie Cecile Thijs

When Marie Cecile Thijs constructs an image, she looks at the object as if she had never seen it, even if the object is familiar. In this way, she deconstructs the image she had of it in order to construct a new one. Her work tends to represent a parallel world where time and space have different dimensions. Every detail seems familiar, real, but at second glance everything is different. The whole is both obvious and foreign. The image may seem classical, but it is surreal. In his world, the absurd is the norm.

Technically, Marie Cecile Thijstra works in the studio with a Hasselblad. Each photograph starts with an idea that she develops in her imagination before looking for ways to stage it and communicate it to the viewer. Whether she’s photographing people, animals or still lifes, her approach is the same. Before starting, she takes the time to familiarise herself with her model. She builds a story around the model. People and animals are always photographed from the front, looking the viewer straight in the eye and reflecting their own curiosity.

She is part of the Staged Photography movement, with several series that began around 2000 and continue to this day: ‘White Collar’; ‘Food Portraits’; ‘Cooks’; ‘Horses’ and ‘Human Angels’. ‘White Collar’, and more recently still lifes featuring Asia and Amsterdam, were produced in collaboration with Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.