Until May 24, 2026, the Charles Nègre Photography Museum welcomes Vision, the first museum retrospective of the Dutch photographer. Through 61 portraits, the artist questions aesthetic canons and celebrates the beauty of singularities. Images crafted like paintings, at the boundary between photography and painting.

With Vision, Justine Tjallinks presents her first retrospective in a museum. The exhibition brings together sixty-one emblematic photographs from her work as a portraitist, offering a complete immersion into her artistic universe.

At the heart of this exhibition, a central question: what is beauty? Through her images, the artist deconstructs contemporary aesthetic norms and invites us to rethink the criteria that define beauty. Each portrait highlights singular faces and bodies, far from usual standards.

Photographs that become paintings

Justine Tjallinks’ work is distinguished by a singular aesthetic: her photographs are designed to resemble true paintings. Inspired by Dutch Golden Age painting, she carefully tends to every detail, light, colors, textures, to give her images a pictorial dimension.

Before even shooting, the artist precisely imagines the scene. This work continues in post-production, where she meticulously reworks her images, combining retouching and digital painting. This process creates portraits where the boundary between photography and painting disappears.

The result is striking: the images seem frozen outside of time, like painted works, while retaining the power of reality

An artistic process founded on encounter

Beyond aesthetics, the artist’s approach is based on a deeply human approach. Justine Tjallinks discovers her models in public spaces, on the streets or along Amsterdam’s canals, before engaging with them in a relationship based on trust and respect.

Each session becomes a collaboration. Makeup, hairstyle, costumes and accessories are carefully chosen to construct a true staging, thought of as a pictorial composition.

This patient work is evident in the images, where each element contributes to a global harmony, reinforcing this impression of a living tableau.

A committed work for the diversity of bodies

The Vision exhibition also carries a strong social dimension. The artist asserts a feminine and committed perspective, in break with the norms that have long fixed the representation of the body.

Her photographs highlight singularities often made invisible: alopecia, albinism, trisomy or vitiligo become central elements of her compositions. By staging them with an aesthetic close to classical painting, Justine Tjallinks gives them a new place in the history of representations.

Her portraits thus invite us to change our perspective: difference is no longer marginal, it becomes essential.

International recognition

Born in 1984 in the Netherlands, Justine Tjallinks lives and works between The Hague and Amsterdam. Trained at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, she started her career as an art director before dedicating herself entirely to photography in 2014.

Today, her work is recognized internationally, with numerous distinctions and participations in major events such as Paris Photo, Photo London or Photo Basel.

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