BarBara Hanlo’s work moves between film, photography, and installation, always guided by an intuitive and experimental approach to image-making. Her practice is rooted in observation and transformation — a continual search for the poetic potential within the visible world. Across her projects, she explores how perception, memory, and material processes can overlap, allowing images to arise as much from experience as from technique. Light, time, and chance play central roles in her work, revealing a sustained fascination with the fragile balance between control and unpredictability.

In her photographic practice, Hanlo approaches the medium much like a painter would: through layering, intuition, and process. Fascinated by the capacity of photography to capture light, she began experimenting with chemical transformations as a way to engage colour differently. Rather than using conventional colour film, she developed her own methods of chemical tinting and toning, which yield a deeper, more earthen palette. The prints — often on baryta paper — amplify this intensity and create an almost tactile depth. Dissolving chemicals, welcoming accidents, and working with unpredictable reactions have become essential to her visual language. “I believe that mystery is to be found in everything,” Hanlo says. “I am only the artist who recognises this mystery in the things around me.”

BarBara Hanlo (b. 1957, the Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. Trained as a filmmaker and photographer, she has been active for decades through her studio and production platform Purple Earth Productions (PEP). Her work has been exhibited widely, including Noorderlicht and in international film festivals. Hanlo’s practice spans still and moving images, analogue and digital techniques, and continues to evolve around a central curiosity for light, material, and perception.