In my photography I further explore my thoughts and fears on the future and it's darkness whilst connecting it to the past and it's feeling on safety and freedom, but also ignorance.
Born in Vlissingen, The Netherlands, in 1982, Carlie Consemulder is a Dutch photographer based in Bavaria, Germany. With a background in fashion photography, she creates both figurative and abstract work that reflects on contemporary society, cultural memory and the ways images shape our expectations of the future. Her photographs often feel suspended between eras. They draw on visual languages associated with fashion, cinema and remembered domestic worlds, while remaining deliberately difficult to place in time.
In her figurative work, Carlie Consemulder constructs scenes from the ground up. Shape, colour, clothing, objects and composition are carefully brought together to create an image that feels familiar yet unresolved. The settings offer a form of escapism, but never complete escape. Beneath their polished surfaces lies an awareness of social unease, environmental responsibility and the tension between nostalgia and progress. Consemulder is interested in the past as both a source of safety and a site of ignorance, asking what is preserved, romanticised or forgotten when one era imagines another.
Her abstract photographs are often uninhabited. Rather than documenting a recognisable subject, they translate atmosphere or emotion into image. A reflection, architectural detail or altered surface can become a psychological space. Across both approaches, Consemulder avoids a single, closed meaning. The works suggest a narrative and invite the viewer to complete it through personal memory and association.
Material choices are part of this position. Carlie Consemulder frequently uses second-hand clothing, props and found materials in her staged photographs, both to reduce her environmental footprint and to allow objects with a previous life to enter the image. This reuse reinforces the sense that her photographs are assembled from traces of different times. Her current series Mint Condition continues this exploration through images that consider how visual culture shapes the way the past is remembered and the future is imagined.
Carlie Consemulder has presented work at Unseen Amsterdam, Photo Basel and PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai, as well as in exhibitions and fairs with NewHouse Gallery. NewHouse Gallery represents Carlie Consemulder in Amsterdam. Browse available works by Carlie Consemulder and explore her exhibition history.