Juliette Erkelens
The Netherlands
Biography
Juliette Erkelens (NL) is a visual artist and photographer based in Amsterdam. Her work explores the fragile nature of memory and time. How moments, once lived, continue to shape us long after they fade.
Originally trained as a lawyer, she shifted her focus to photography, graduating cum laude from the Photo Academy Amsterdam, where she received the “Best Of Members Award” from the Photographers Association of the Netherlands. Her work has been exhibited in institutions such as the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Museum de Fundatie, and the Resistance Museum Amsterdam.
Through techniques such as Polaroid, digital layering, and reworking archival family materials, Erkelens examines the tension between permanence and disappearance. Her images; soft, tactile, and intimate, often emerge from personal memory yet speak to a universal experience: the beauty and vulnerability of what slips away.
In recent projects, including Contours, she reflects on the gradual fading of her mother’s memory due to Alzheimer’s, exploring how traces of love, light, and presence persist beyond loss.
Project
“A la recherche des expectations perdues” by Juliette Erkelens is a photographic project rooted in a meditation on expectation, memory and the poetic tension between presence and absence. The series — whose title references a search for lost expectations — comprises images that evoke the subtle interplays between personal longing, the passage of time and the traces left behind in lived experience. Erkelens’s work often reflects her interest in portraiture, transience and analogue processes, producing imagery that feels intimate, reflective and imbued with quiet emotional depth.
