About Nelie van der Ent

Recently Nelie was walking through the outer streets of Dordrecht when a teenager asked her if she was a journalist. She told him that she was not, that she was just discovering the town and taking pictures. “What are you taking pictures of?” he continued. “Simply of anything that strikes me” she answered. This small conversation may not seem very interesting but it illustrates Nelie’s roaming about wherever she goes. It was not the first time someone started a conversation upon noticing her big black camera. Much to her surprise, people in the street spontaneously ask to be portrayed sometimes.

Nelie was born in 1960 and grew up in Krimpen aan den IJssel, a small town near Rotterdam in the Netherlands. As a young girl she saw her father taking pictures on vacations and thought that people were meant to do so. When she turned 14 she had saved enough money to buy herself a compact camera which she took abroad to make her first holiday slides. In between summer holidays the camera was rarely used and if it was used,  it was to record the daily life of her family. After finishing high school she got a reflex camera which she started to use more often. Only in 2009, on obtaining a digital camera the amount of photos she made rose substantially and a selection of these quite recent ones is shown here.

When you look at Nelie’s work you’ll find that she chooses many different subjects to photograph. Her favourite hunting reserve is urban public space. There, she loves to catch shots of touching interactions, people at work or isolated in their surroundings,  similarities in color or shape, unique clothing and funny situations in which details and timing are important. The still images are more about composition and light.

Jan van Steenbergen, May 2015