Henri Blommers is a visual artist from Amsterdam who works both analog and digital and uses stitching, collage, and other techniques in his practice. He manipulates film with chemicals and botanical ingredients during different stages. He creates a refuge to an otherworldly dimension full of bright colors based on contemporary socially engaged or environmental themes such as the impact of plastics, sea level rise, biodiversity loss, and digital influences on our lives. The alchemic substantiation of these themes on the medium is the basis of his working process.
From a working-class background, his love for photography grew during his military service. After a career in IT, he transitioned to photography, after graduating from the Amsterdam Fotoacademie in 2010.
Henri has been the image editor of Hello Gorgeous, a magazine combating HIV stigmatization for since for over a decade. In 2022, he curated eight exhibitions on 40 years of HIV
As an image make/visual artist, I never was interested in staying on the road to be a purist. I started to paint and draw on my images in the nineties for example, long before my actual development started. So the discovery of Agora was a feast.
It was not only the incredible amount of new skills and techniques that interested me, it was fantastic to be part of a group of people both online and in the online zoom classes, that were open to experiment that were eager to share their knowledge, that were not hiding their progress.
So far I did a mentoring program and a course with all the basic, intermediate and advance techniques. It in the end it brought me all kinds of new opportunities, since then I have expanded my toolbox with for example double exposure, I developed cyanolumen as a workshop for the experimental festival, I experiment with cyanotype and the list is endless.
Besides all these techniques and wonderful people, it made me also aware of the context of my work from an art and historic perspective.
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Featured Project
Henri Blommers’ newest project “The Salted Earth” on salinization is a combination of new and old techniques that gives a voice to the plant world as Lensculture poetically described the series. It will be on view at the 9th edition of Bucharest Fotofest.
When Henri visited his mother, she accidentally poured vinegar over her newly bought crate of violets. The plants wilted instantly. It reminded him of a similar process of salinization that is happening at a global level due to climate change and agricultural practices.
In the mean time ,household salt and vinegar, still promoted as bio-friendly herbicides, have an all-destructive impact on the soil where more than 60% of all organisms live.
An estimated 1/5 of agricultural grounds have been affected worldwide. Salt was used to fatally destroy a community in biblical times. Salinization creates new deserts and impacts food production for an ever-growing world population.
Process: By picking plants from his own garden and spraying them with salt, putting them on old photographic paper, soaking negatives in salt or using salt in all kinds of different ways, the process of salinization is materialized in the final image.