WORK
All images are recent, from 2021 up until now.
ABOUT
Because 'everything we do is politics', I'm trying to focus on the other layers of our being, what it means to be human as part of nature. Photography represents the reality through the eye of the beholder, in that moment. But it's such a limiting idea, it's not that photography captures a part of the soul, I do not believe that. Mostly photographing people is awkward, you aks them to become self aware and the pictures that carry my interest are the ones where that is so blatantly visible, that moment people settle into their awkwardness and realise they are okay with it. You don't really need to be comfortable, you can just be real and the beholder will see exactly that as pure beauty,
as who we are in that single moment.
Samuel Beckett wrote : "Perhaps that is what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that is what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I have two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that is what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world,
I don't belong to either."
Marijn Achten is a queer poc photographer, too weird to live, and too rare to die.
Born in India (1980), grew up in Bocholt, Belgium and currently residing in Koksijde, graduated with
a Master in Visual Arts at the Media, Arts and Design Faculty Genk in 2004.
Marijn has been working as a freelance photographer, is part of the digital artist duo Feral Plains and life partner to political scientist and painter Biem D'hondt. Through Beautiful Bizarre Magazine their work is now part of The Lunar Codex, a time capsule that stores art on the moon as a legacy to be viewed by future humans as part of our shared human history.
Projects vary from portraits and landscapes for Virgin Music to De Standaard, Het Parool, Sensoa, Zeeland Magazine, Cultuur Lokaal to own projects with exhibitions in Ghent, Brussels, San Diego and more.
Currently Marijn is working on @cavalierqueer, a collection of queer stories about the future, thoughts, hopes and dreams and the courage to imagine more.