Justine Tjallinks

Justine Tjallinks was born in 1984 in the Netherlands and arrived at fine-art photography through an unconventional path. She studied at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, earning a Bachelor in Concepts & Brands in 2008, then spent several years working as an art director and graphic designer in fashion publishing before committing fully to her own photographic practice in 2014. Self-taught as a photographer, she brought to portraiture a designer's sensitivity to surface, composition, and constructed image-making — qualities that would become the defining signature of her work.

Her earliest independent series, The Outsiders (2014) and The Leftovers (2015), established her interest in subjects who exist at the margins of conventional representation, approached with a quiet insistence on individual dignity. The Nude series (2015–2016) brought her first major international recognition, earning the Grand Prize at the Life Framer Awards in 2015 and First Prize in the Portrait category at the LensCulture Portrait Awards in 2016. That same year, The Outsiders received the Silver award in the Portrait category at the Siena International Photo Awards, and she began developing Vision and Silence, bodies of work that deepened her painterly, historically inflected portrait language. In 2019 she was named Photographer of the Year by the Fine Art Photography Awards, and in 2020 she was a finalist for Portrait of Humanity. Across series including Surfaces (2018), LTDI (2018), Amber (2019), Oscuro (2019), Morose (2020), Cow Parsley (2021), and the recurring Modern Times — begun in 2017 and revisited through 2023–2024 — Tjallinks has sustained a coherent visual world defined by controlled light, meticulous staging, and a tonal range that moves between luminous restraint and dramatic shadow.

Tjallinks is represented by Galerie Sophie Scheidecker in Paris, and has presented solo exhibitions at Contour Gallery in Rotterdam (2017), Kahmann Gallery in Amsterdam (2021), and Galerie Sophie Scheidecker (2023). Her work has been covered by publications including Le Figaro, Fisheye Magazine, GUP Magazine, and LENSCRATCH. In 2025 she participates in the group exhibition Geology of Souls, an exhibition about Life narratives at the Thalie Foundation in Arles. Her most significant institutional milestone to date is Vision, her first museum retrospective — comprising sixty-one photographs and running from 14 February to 24 May 2026 at the Musée de la Photographie Charles Nègre in Nice — alongside the presentation of Nocturnal in connection with Photo London 2026 and further programming linked to Paris Photo through Galerie Sophie Scheidecker.