KATRIEN DE BLAUWER : Blue Bruises - PREORDER

The first time I held one of Katrien’s collages in my hands, it felt like opening
a private diary where words had been replaced by visual fragments: a hand, a shoulder, a silhouette, a hidden gaze. As if, by cutting, reframing, erasing, she revealed something more accurate than reality itself something truer than the original photograph.

Her work evokes the uneasy silence of an Antonioni film, the unspoken tensions that gather in the margins of the image, bodies held in suspension. In her collages there is the hushed, troubled, and sensual atmosphere of 1950s cinema. As in film noir, it is not action that matters, but waiting. Not dialogue, but the glances that are avoided. And women, often fragmented, become ghostly presences — at once desired and elusive.

Katrien does not photograph; she collects. She hunts, she searches, she cuts in silence. And from that silence emerges a language of rare intensity. These are images of absence, of memory, of solitude. Images that impose nothing,
yet inhabit you long after you have left them. Above all, they speak of us.

This book is a passage. A plunge into a world where intimacy is expressed through suggestion, where the off-screen becomes the true subject. It is not about understanding, but about feeling. About letting oneself be crossed through. About listening to what whispers behind the images.

Katrien De Blauwer cuts into the world, and in the gaps she opens, something of ourselves appears.'

Roger Szmulewicz, October 2025 

The FIFTY ONE Publication 'cheveux longs… cheveux courts' is released on the occasion of Paris Photo 2025 and the upcoming solo show at Art Antwerp 2025.