For two decades, Hanne Lamon (b. 1982) has been making tranquil photographs of her everyday life that possess an unruly beauty.
Her poetic universe evinces great sensitivity and melancholy.
The photographer creates images that shed light on a fragile and intimate world.
Lamon focuses on human body language, subtle touches and draperies, as well as mysterious landscape scenes and abstract compositions. She experiments with film photography, specific types of paper, and manual graphic printing processes. Her choices are well thought out and attest to a longing for artisanal and tactile beauty.
These techniques are closely connected to her way of looking. At a time when images are increasingly produced and consumed at great speed, Lamon embraces a slower and more deliberate process. The physical character of the photographic image thus becomes an essential part of its meaning.
As an artist, she explores themes of intimacy, vulnerability, femininity, and self-image—themes she brings literally into view in her recent project Vulva Obscura. With this work, she challenges the shame surrounding female anatomy and reveals the diversity and beauty of the vulva beyond stereotypes and taboos.
Her work moves at the intersection of photography, corporeality, and social representation. She questions what we consider normal, beautiful, or desirable, and how deeply these ideas are shaped by culture, shame, and the gaze of others.
This way of looking has its origins much earlier. At the age of thirteen, Hanne Lamon found an analogue camera belonging to her mother. She began photographing herself, her friends, and her surroundings. What started as an intuitive way of looking and collecting became the first chapter of a visual language that would characterise her oeuvre.
Much is already contained within these early images: the gaze upon the body, intimacy, friendship, desire, vulnerability, and the search for who one is becoming.
Years later, Lamon returned to this material in Blood Roses, an unfinished series in which she explores what it means to grow up as a girl. The images carry dreams and expectations, but also disappointment, boundaries, uncertainty, desire, and the sometimes uncomfortable transition from child to woman.
By revisiting her own personal archive, Lamon connects the girl who once stood behind the camera with the woman who looks back today. Photography thus becomes not only a way of capturing, but also a way of remembering, investigating, and giving new meaning.
This personal involvement also remains central to her later work. The project was inspired by the transformation of her daughter Loesje’s body. Lamon felt a spontaneous urge to speak openly about physicality, intimacy, and topics such as menstruation. She wanted her daughter to feel completely at home in her body—especially in the areas that often remain invisible.
Breaking a lance for the vulva, removing shame from the labia, and making their unseen diversity visible form the driving force behind Hanne Lamon’s photographic project Vulva Obscura. By portraying the intimate areas of more than one hundred women, she opens up a new perspective on this source of life force. She lifts the veil from what is usually hidden and subtly reveals a wealth of unique forms and appearances.
She shows that every vulva—from the mons pubis and labia to the clitoris and vaginal entrance—is special, beautiful, and worthy.
Alongside this explicit bodily and social subject matter, Lamon continues to return to her own personal history. Until the End ___ I Will Follow is an ongoing series, born from a personal translation, intimate yet universally recognisable. The series contains images spanning more than twenty years and continues to grow.
The images are deeply rooted in personal struggles, turbulence, and feelings of loss and hope. The photographer translates her struggles and conflicting emotions into metaphorical and often dark imagery that both conceals and reveals. Even though the photographs emerge from the artist’s own personal environment, they are nonetheless timeless, connective, and universal. They suggest narratives and memories that possess a moving familiarity.
For the artist’s book Until the End ___ I Will Follow You, she tried to reveal the foundation of her photographic production, which turns out to be fragile and contradictory. This fragile, precious gem was created on the basis of intuition and rationality, through a fast and unconscious, yet similarly deliberate and slow way of thinking.
Some thirty ambiguous images were printed on wafer-thin paper, like photographic ice crystals in which time has been frozen. Tina De Souter gave the book a sober and elegant design, further enriched with a poetic text by Birsen Uçar, also known as the voice of the atmospheric dream-pop band Hydrogen Sea.
Lamon does not attempt to permanently fix the fleeting, but rather to give it a temporary form. Her photographs remain deliberately open, preserving space for uncertainty, memory, and imagination. This openness is precisely where their strength lies. They present a fragile world without ever fully revealing it.
What remains is a quiet and intimate visual language in which loss and hope, closeness and distance, reality and memory continuously enter into dialogue. [Official Website]
