Still Life Week: Sander Vos

Still Life Week: Sander Vos by Kimberly WithamJuly 30, 2026

©Sander Vos, In Between the Shadows 1

This week we are featuring Still Life projects, and on Friday we finish with a 4-part Exhibition on Still Lifes!

I don’t recall where I first encountered Sander Vos’ still life images (AIPAD?), but I do remember stopping in my tracks. There was something immediately compelling about them that resisted a passing glance His photographs have hints of Georgio Morandi’s delicate paintings, MC Escher’s complex illustrations, and Man Ray’s Surrealist experiments, yet they ultimately feel entirely their own.

Vos’ photographs ask viewers to slow down, look closely, and decipher the relationships between objects, light, shadow and space. In today’s image-saturated world, creating images that invite sustained attention is no small feat.

Vos shares his process here.

©Sander Vos, In Between the Shadows 2

In Between the Shadows

My work is an investigation into the mechanics of perception. I construct layered photographic images designed to disrupt “automated seeing,” the way our brains quickly categorize and dismiss the world around us. By using fragmentation, collage, and shifting perspectives, I transform familiar subjects into arrangements that feel both alien and recognizable.I am interested in the moment the viewer is forced to pause, search, and reassemble meaning. In series such as Interpolation and In Between the Shadows, I treat photography not as a record of the world, but as a tool for revealing how we actively build our own reality. In these works, light, shadow, and negative space act as catalysts to interrupt habit and draw the viewer into a state of active observation.

©Sander Vos, In Between the Shadows 3

Sander Vos (b. 1988) is a Dutch, London-based artist who constructs layered photographic images that disrupt automated seeing. He uses fragmentation, collage, and shifting perspectives to transform familiar subjects such as portraits, still lifes, and everyday objects into dreamlike arrangements that feel both alien and recognizable.

Viewers are invited to pause, search, and reassemble meaning, stepping briefly outside the illusions of constructed reality. Photography becomes not a record of the world but a tool for revealing how perception is actively assembled. Light, shadow, and negative space act as tools that interrupt habitual ways of looking and draw viewers in.

Working across digital and analog processes, Vos creates compositions that resist immediate clarity. Meaning unfolds gradually, revealing the delicate relationship between reality, perception, and consciousness.

Instagram: @sandervos

©Sander Vos, In Between the Shadows 4

While you make portraits and other images besides still life, “In Between the Shadows” is comprised entirely of still life images. What is it about still life that appeals to you?

It’s really about transforming the meaning of these objects and challenging the way they are ordinarily depicted.
Visually I treat still life objects a bit like buildings, and accentuate their architectural lines and shapes. But by doing so I aim to get the viewer to relook at these objects in the way they wouldn’t have before. For me they serve as a way to break our habitual ways of looking at things and reveal in visual way that multiple perspectives and realities can exist at the same time.

©Sander Vos, In Between the Shadows 5

Your images have a dizzying quality which makes the viewer question perception. Can you talk about the process of making these images? How much is digital and how much is analog cut and paste?

The works in the series In Between the Shadows are ultimately created digitally, though they are deeply informed by physical manipulation. I work with physical objects and paper cutouts, seeking interesting angles and high-contrast lighting setups that accentuate their unique shapes. I then digitally assemble these photographs into compositions that still retain recognizable elements, but feel alien and harmonically fractured: inviting the viewer to take a moment to really assess what they’re looking at.