Bio

Jurgen Onland is a Dutch fine art photographer whose work explores the relationship between memory, absence, and the landscapes that shape our sense of belonging. Through long-term photographic projects, he creates poetic visual narratives in which traces of human presence remain visible, even when people themselves are absent. His photographs invite viewers to slow down and discover meaning in places that often go unnoticed.

After completing the Visual Storytelling programme at Forum BEELDtaal Academy, Onland continued to develop his practice through workshops with photographers including Tomasz Łaczny and the Kiekie Academy. His work has been exhibited at Pennings Foundation (UNCOVER 23 and UNCOVER 26), Fotofestival aan de Maas, the IJsselbiënnale, and in Paris. It has been featured in publications including Gente di Fotografia, PF.nl, Photo31, and Urbanautica, where Steve Bisson described his work as "mythopoetic." His projects have also been shortlisted for the Urbanautica Institute Awards in 2023, 2024, and 2025, while earlier in his career he received several Urban Photo Race awards across Europe.

Onland's practice is rooted in wandering through familiar landscapes, collecting images that gradually reveal their meaning when brought together. Rather than documenting places, he constructs quiet spaces where memory, imagination, and lived experience intersect.

He is currently working on 13 Miles, an ongoing project made within a thirteen-mile radius of his home. Through repeated walks and careful observation, the work investigates how familiarity, distance, and memory shape our relationship with the landscapes we inhabit.

Artist statement

“Photography as a way to build one’s own world around what is absent, fading, or left behind.”

As a child, I would wander for hours through fields and forests. I built huts out of branches and found materials, in places that were just for me. As soon as my hut was finished, I would retreat inside to watch, wait, and disappear. Outside, I found something I couldn’t always find at home or in the village: comfort, freedom, and the sense that I could be myself. That’s how I built my own world.

Now that I’m older, what I remember most is wandering through a familiar landscape, paying attention to what lies on the margins: an abandoned building, the edge of a forest, a field, or an object that seems to have become detached from its surroundings. That way of seeing still lies at the heart of my photography.

The landscape holds the memory of my heritage, and I encounter memories as I wander through it. Sometimes something presents itself from which an image slowly emerges that finds its way into a photograph. More often, I collect photos that move me along the way without my immediately understanding why. Only when I put them together do they begin to converse with one another. Then I listen attentively to what unfolds between the images.

People are absent from many of my images. Yet they have never completely disappeared. Their presence remains palpable in what they have left behind. Sometimes it is someone who was once there, or someone who might have been there. What is missing is often just as important as what is visible. Not as a subject, but as something that influences the way I look, search, and photograph.

Just as I used to build my huts, I now use photography to shape my own world. The materials have changed, but the urge to build remains. My images invite you to take a closer look at what cannot be immediately explained—at traces, edges, abandoned places, and silences in the landscape. In this way, I create space for what remains elusive or absent: what appears and then disappears, what lingers, and what, despite everything, seems to be out of reach.