Promise

‘Promise’ is a lengthy project I’m still working on and will consist of several works. I remember myself as a little girl often playing on my own. One of the things I did was to bury my dolls (my girls) in a secret place in our backyard. I fantasized about a magical dreamworld where my girls were going to. ‘Promise’ shows a physical space that stands for a symbolic, transcendent space in another kind of world inhabited by these children. The beauty of childhood and this fantasy is further emphasized by the careful and meticulous editing of my works.

Flokje van Lith (The Netherlands, 1969) studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. For many years Van Lith worked as a portrait photographer commissioned by both companies and private clients. Since 2011 she focuses more on her independent work. After having completed her first autonomous series in 2011, it got selected immediately for the prestigious Photo Festival Naarden, soon after which participation in international exhibitions and art fairs followed. Van Lith's portraits of a subdued mood depict universal emotive states such as sorrow, solitude and melancholy and act as counterweight to our turbulent times. Inspired by personal childhood memories and temporary muses whom she encounters by chance, her images allude to the kind of parallel worlds young women can inhabit. In one telling reminiscence of childhood, Van Lith is playing a secret self-invented game in which she buries her dolls and fantasizes that being under ground opens doors to parallel universes. These imagined parallel worlds are part of what she recreates in her contemporary portraiture. Aside from childhood memories, Van Lith finds inspiration in the formal qualities and emotional substance of the portraits done by Flemish Primitives and Italian Renaissance masters. Photographing her muses and backgrounds in interior settings allows Van Lith to take full advantage of the incidence of light and of chiaroscuro. She uses a medium-format camera for its ability to record in great detail. During post-production she continues to labor over images for weeks and often months on end, until she arrives at the perfect marriage of models and the carefully chosen environments of decay. In short, her work can be characterized as painting with photography.