Annelie Vandendael was born in Belgium in 1987 and grew up in the South of France. After college, she came back to Belgium to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Kask) in Gent, where she got a master's degree in Photography. Images have always been a passion for Annelie. After finishing her studies, she was invited to La Fabrica, the Benetton Communication and Research Center in Treviso, Italy. She was also nominated for the Photo Academy Award in the Netherlands and won the Award of the Roorda Agency, Amsterdam. She has participated in several exhibitions such as the Photo Festival in Knokke (Belgium), the Knack Weekend Photo Award Brussels (Belgium), the Photo Museum in Den Haag (Netherlands). Recently, she shot the swimwear collection for Paul Smith and the shoe campaign for Mellow Yellow.

Annelie mostly works with a Hasselblad analog camera because she believes it produces more realistic images : "Today it is not obvious that what you see is a real image, everything is manipulated and photoshopped. I like to see real people with their imperfections, that is more interesting. I put the human as a piece of nature or an object in my picture. It’s a reaction towards a lot of fashion photography in which the personality seems unimportant. This is why I want to let the authenticity of the body speak for itself, because an over-manipulated body gives us a wrong perception of reality".

 

AWARDS

Selected International Exposure Competition Vogue, New York (2013) - Award in category fine arts ‘IPA, International Photography Awards), Los Angeles - Winner at the 7th Annual Photography Masters Cup with Honorable Mention in Fashion | sois belle (2014) - Gold Medal award in the San Francisco International Photography Exhibition (2014)