Sunken Beauty. Where beauty dissolves and memory lingers a visual meditation on transformation and release.
A flower opens in silence. Submerged in water, surrounded by pigment, smoke, and ice, it drifts like a memory slowly taking shape. What begins as vivid and familiar gradually dissolves.
Edges blur, colors bleed, structures distort. In this stillness, the image detaches from reality.
Sunken Beauty is a visual journey through emergence, decay, and disappearance. The series invites slow looking. The flowers at times clear, at times obscured shift from tangible to abstract. Some images are layered through multiple exposures; others are built from frozen textures or flowing pigment. What begins as beauty becomes an unfolding process of transformation.
Exploration is central to this work. I create intuitively yet deliberately experimenting with movement, liquid, and light. My style is layered, both visually and conceptually. Structures emerge from organic reactions; colors blend into suggestive forms. Each piece holds traces of time, chance, and control.
As a viewer, you are invited to linger. Recognition fades into wonder. What, exactly, are you seeing? What remains visible, and what slips away? Rather than offering instant clarity, this series encourages drifting getting lost, questioning, and sensing. It invites you to look again, and then again.
At times, birds appear shadows of freedom. Sometimes the flower seems to break away entirely from its origin. In the end, only traces remain: color, form, texture. The flowers do not vanish; they transform into light, into quiet, into a whisper of what once was.
Sunken Beauty is an ode to impermanence, but also to imagination. A reflection on how beauty lies not only in perfection, but in movement, in letting go, in forgetting and in what continues to resonate, deep beneath the surface. [Official Website]
About August Langhout
August Langhout (1961) is a self-taught Dutch photographer whose work explores the fragile tension between memory, atmosphere, and the natural world. With a background as a technical advisor, he has developed his visual language over recent years through in-depth collaborations with renowned Dutch photographers at Fotofabryk in Leeuwarden. His intuitive, layered approach to visual storytelling blends technical precision with emotional depth.
Inspired by Impressionism and the ephemeral beauty of nature, Langhout often merges multiple images, textures, and tones, blending fragments of reality into emotionally charged memoryscapes. Through color, reflection, and abstraction, he transforms landscapes and still lifes into immersive, dreamlike environments. The final layer in this process is the use of fine art paper, which becomes a tactile surface between the image and the viewer, reinforcing the emotional resonance and visual depth of his work.
His style is defined by layered compositions and painterly aesthetics. By embracing chance, fluidity, and impermanence, he captures fleeting moments of light and transformation. His work invites quiet reflection: to pause, to look deeper, and to dwell in the subtle poetry of the in-between.
Langhout’s photography has received international recognition, including a Category Win at the Fine Art Photography Awards 2025 (FAPA), as well as awards from the EPA, IPA, and ND Awards. His work has been featured in the Dutch photography journal Pf Magazine and appeared in an online showcase by Dodho Magazine in April 2025.
