Roel Backaert

Roel Backaert began his photography studies at Studenteninformatiesysteem Antwerpen (SisA) in Antwerp, and also studied at the Sint-Lukas Academie in Brussels. He lives and works in Amsterdam where he graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2004. Since then he has been travelling the world as an architectural photographer and pursued a career as an autonomous artist. The main focus in his work is the urban landscape from which he often plucks a peculiar object, building or cityscape out of its context to present it in compelling centralized compositions. Backaert works mostly at night with a 4 × 5 inch (10.2 × 12.7 cm) analogue camera using very long shutter-speeds that pull the subjects out of the darkness into an exceptionally colourful twilight.