Awoiska van der Molen
Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places. Van der Molen has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the Prix Pictet, and her work is held in the collections of the Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Life and work. Van der Molen studied architecture and design at Academie Minerva in Groningen, Netherlands, then photography at Hunter College, City University of New York, New York City. In  2003 she gained an MFA in photography at Academy of Art and Design St. Joost in Breda, Netherlands. Between 2000 and 2003, she made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city. Since 2009 Van der Molen has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom. Her first book, "Sequester" (2014), "photographed throughout the whole of Europe  including the volcanic Canary Islands, contains monochromatic landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey". "Blanco" (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees. "The Living Mountain" (2020) is "a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit." Sean O'Hagan and Jörg Colberg have praised the quality of her prints.