C-print Roel, Johan van Walsem, 2009

C-print by the Dutch photographer Johan van Walsem, dated 2009, titled Roel. The portrait shows a young man against a light wall, frontal and at rest, with his arms behind his back. A horizontal line runs across the background at hip height, a compositional element that divides the image in two and places the body at the centre of the frame. The chromogenic print is executed in soft, cool tones, with fine skin nuances characteristic of the analogue photographic process.

Van Walsem has worked since the nineteen-nineties on a photographic body of work around male portraiture, in which the body is recorded as observation rather than staged. His images stand in a tradition reaching back to Dutch portrait painting, with attention to light, posture and the silence between model and lens. His work has been shown at Galerie MooiMan in Groningen, the northern Dutch platform for art centred on the male figure, and is held in private and institutional collections in the Netherlands and beyond. The work is signed on the reverse of the photograph; the signature is not visible due to the closure of the frame and remains preserved as finished by the photographer.