My work begins with curiosity: about people, about what is not immediately visible, and about the fragile states that exist between certainty and uncertainty.
I am less interested in describing a subject than in creating an atmosphere in which something can be sensed without being fully explained.
Photography allows me to observe closely while still leaving room for ambiguity, imagination, and emotion.
I am drawn to moments that feel suspended—moments in which a gesture, a look, a landscape, or an unexpected detail seems to carry more than its literal appearance. Rather than constructing a closed narrative, I prefer to bring images together through intuition and association. Portraits may be placed alongside landscapes, water, vegetation, or abstract details from the natural world. These images are not intended as fixed symbols. They function more like echoes or emotional counterpoints, opening connections that viewers can interpret for themselves.
This approach is central to IN BETWEEN, a project that grew from my curiosity about adolescence. Having no children of my own, I used the camera as a kind of looking glass through which to observe a generation of young people at a particularly complex stage of life. I photographed Belgian adolescents between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, but my intention was never to document the specific characteristics of one generation. Instead, I wanted to approach puberty as a timeless transitional state: a period of vulnerability, uncertainty, self-consciousness, discovery, and change.
By removing much of the contextual information from the portraits, I wanted the young people to communicate through their presence: through their gaze, posture, body language, and the subtle distance they establish between themselves and the camera. Interwoven with these portraits, images from the natural world extend the emotional space of the series. A turbulent sea, a dark landscape, a fragile surface, or an unfamiliar texture can introduce tension, stillness, or unease without dictating what the viewer should feel.
This way of working extends beyond IN BETWEEN. I am continually drawn to the suggestive potential of photography and to images that reveal themselves gradually. I look for a certain visual poetry—sometimes quiet, sometimes unsettling—and for the point at which the familiar becomes slightly enigmatic.
I do not want my photographs to provide answers. I want them to create a space in which viewers can bring their own memories, associations, and emotions. For me, an image becomes most interesting when it remains open: when what is absent matters as much as what is present, and when looking becomes an act of interpretation rather than recognition.
About Miranda Schmitz
Miranda Schmitz (1969) is a Belgian fine art photographer whose work explores the subtle emotional and psychological dimensions of human experience. Drawn to atmosphere, ambiguity, and the unspoken, she creates images that resist a single, fixed interpretation. Her photographs are characterised by a cinematic sensibility and a particular sensitivity to gesture, mood, and light, inviting viewers to construct their own narratives from what is revealed and what remains concealed.
Schmitz initially studied Economics at the University of Antwerp and pursued a professional career as an independent interim manager and consultant before developing her artistic practice in photography. From 2012 to 2017, she studied Art Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lier, Belgium. She subsequently deepened her photographic language through international masterclasses, including those with Michael Ackerman at PhotoWerkBerlin and Klavdij Sluban in Paris, alongside workshops with a wide range of established photographers.
Her graduation project, IN BETWEEN, marked an important point in the development of her artistic practice. Centred on adolescents at the threshold between childhood and adulthood, the series interweaves portraits with evocative images of landscapes and the natural world. Stripped of explanatory context, the photographs rely on expression, posture, atmosphere, and visual association rather than conventional narrative. Together, they evoke the uncertainty, vulnerability, and intensity of a transitional phase in which identity is still taking shape.
Since graduating, Schmitz’s work has received extensive international recognition. Her photographs have been presented in solo and curated group exhibitions throughout Europe, the United States, Australia, Asia, and Africa. Exhibitions and festivals have included Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Francisco Bay International Photo Show, ILHAM Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, the Lishui Art Museum in China, PH21 Gallery in Budapest, and Africa Photo Fair.
Her distinctions include a Gold Medal and Portfolio Award at the San Francisco Bay International Photo Show, Gold at PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris, Silver at the Budapest International Foto Awards, and numerous awards, honourable mentions, and nominations in international photography competitions. She was selected as a New Dutch Photography Talent by GUP Magazine, which also featured her work on its cover. Her photographs have appeared in international photography magazines, catalogues, and other publications.
Across portraiture and her wider photographic practice, Schmitz seeks visual poetry rather than literal description. Her images inhabit the territory between observation and imagination, using ambiguity not to obscure meaning, but to leave it open. [Official Website]
