Rob Severein (Netherlands, b. 1964)
Rob Severein turned to photography only 10 years ago. After a long and prosperous career as a creative director in the field of advertising, he found himself irresistibly drawn to visual storytelling and photography. He left his own agency in 2011 and signed up for a 3-year master programme at the Amsterdam Photo Academy.
His work has a strong narrative character. It distinguishes itself by a deep fascination for headstrong people and their relationship to their natural surroundings. He combines landscapes, stills and portraits in which he tries to let poetry, personal stories and experiences of people shimmer through in a way that touches him.
In 2015 his first two major series about the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl and the right wing AZOV battalion in Ukraine were published in Dutch national daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad and VICE Magazine. The work also received an honourable mention in the SO Dutch Photography Awards that same year.
In 2017/2018 Rob participated in the Northern Lights Photography Masterclass (Noorderlicht Photography Masterclass) with HE SECRETLY CARRIED HER PICTURE. A family story about his late grandfather who escaped from a German forced labour camp in WW2 and returned home on foot.
He started a new photography project about an unruly land tucked away in the far Northwest of Dutch province Friesland in 2018. FOORBIJ NIJ ALTOENAE (Past Nij Altoenae), his first monograph, was published in October 2020.
Today, working as an independent photography-based artist, things are slowly taking shape in THIS AUTUMN EVE. A series about the threatened peat and wetlands of the Netherlands. About the diminishing quality of stillness, space and dusk.
