ELIZABETH ALDERLIESTEN 
Dordrecht (NL), 1972

Elizabeth Alderliesten is a Dutch photography-based artist. As global citizen she currently lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.

FRESH EYES Photo selected her as one of the 100 greatest emerging photography talents in Europe of 2020, she is featured on one of the four covers of the yearbook. She is also included in GUP New Photo Talent yearbook 2020. 

In early 2022, she participated in a workshop with Dirk Braeckman and Brad Feuerhelm in Athens. She then started the year-long Photobook Workshop with Nearest Truth. From 2020 until 2022 she attended Le Masterklass with Klavdij Sluban in Paris. In 2019 she followed an Expert Program with Machiel Botman in Amsterdam. She graduated from the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam in 2019. 

In her photographs, she explores and researches the complexity of the woman and her dual nature. In today's modern society with its many demands, she is often shaped by external expectations, by her surroundings or by events from the past. As a result, she tends to hide and enclose herself in her desired environment. For Elizabeth, the ability to adapt when it comes to social interactions means a constant metamorphosis of human existence. Reconnecting with a woman's instinctive nature is an ongoing quest; to reveal or conceal, without darkness no light and no light without darkness. In her photographs, she uses her subjects to aesthetically depict this process of constant change and adaptation.

Her photos are images in themselves rather than images of something. Each image is contained within itself, creating its own time and space. She sees them as free and poetic visual rhymes that may elicit stories in the viewer’s imagination. The transition from one moment to the next in which the viewer uses his fantasy to feel what the next moment will be.

Time is an important factor in her images, but also in her work process. The delay that occurs by mostly shooting images analog, but also the magic the process evokes. Moments of imaginative transformation in which no action takes place.

In an intuitive way she collect images, mostly on analog film. The negative is her starting point from which she shapes her images. The real interpretation of the image takes place during printing in the darkroom or while manipulating the digitised negative on the screen.

Combining old and new processes stimulates her to research more deeply. Materiality within that plays an important role.