Tomas van Houtryve is a Belgian visual artist,[1] director and cinematographer[2] working mainly with photography and video. He is an Emeritus member of the VII Photo Agency,[3] and a Contributing Artist for Harper's Magazine.[4]
Van Houtryve attended a university in Nepal, studying philosophy. He became internationally known for his photographs of the Maoist rebellion in Nepal, winning the Visa pour l'Image Ville de Perpignan award in 2006[5] and the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents in 2006.[6]
Van Houtryve next embarked on a seven-year photographic project to document life in the last countries where the Communist Party still remained in power: North Korea, Cuba, China, Nepal, Vietnam, and Laos. In 2010 he was named Photographer of the Year[7] in the Pictures of the Year International Competition. A monograph of the work titled Behind the Curtains of 21st Century Communism was published in 2012.[8]
Van Houtryve then turned his interest to the US military's use of surveillance drones with a series titled Blue Sky Days.[9] Supported by a Getty Editorial Grant of $10,000,[10] he used his own modified drone in the US to explore the implications of surveillance techniques used by the US both outside and within its borders.[11][12] For this work, van Houtryve was awarded the 2015 International Center of Photography Infinity Award[13] and a second prize World Press Photo award.[14]
In 2016 van Houtryve received a grant from the Pulitzer Center to create a video installation about the European refugee crisis.[15] The work was exhibited at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography[16] the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art[17] and C/O Berlin.[18] Extracts from the project were published in a 2021 book by Steidl[19] and by The New Yorker.[20] In 2017, the video installation was acquired for the permanent collection of the International Center for Photography with funds provided by Marjorie and Jeffrey Rosen.[21]
Van Houtryve was selected for the inaugural CatchLight Fellowship in 2017 and granted $30,000[22] for a project titled Lines and Lineage. The work explores America's collective amnesia of history, addressing the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. Van Houtryve photographed the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera.[23] He paired portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period.[24] The work earned van Houtryve France's 2019 Roger Pic Award.[25] A monograph of the work was published in 2019 by Radius Books.[26] The book was adapted into a one-hour documentary by French television, co-directed by van Houtryve and Mathilde Damoisel.[27] The film was first broadcast in France in 2022.[28] It premiered in the United States with a screening at the Taos Center for the Arts under the title Far West – The Hidden History in 2022.[29]
In 2022, van Houtryve's aerial drone photograph of Notre-Dame de Paris was featured on the cover of National Geographic Magazine.[30]
Van Houtryve's work is held in the following public collections: