About Carla van de Puttelaar


Carla van de Puttelaar

Carla van de Puttelaar (1967, Zaandam) lives and works in Amsterdam. In 1996, she graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. In the same year she was awarded the Esther Kroon Prize, and in 2002 she won the Prix de Rome Basic Prize. In 2006 she was a nominee for Le Prix Découverte des Rencontres d’Arles. Her photographic work has gained worldwide recognition, and she has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries around the world. Her work has appeared in many publications including eight monographs. She works for international acclaimed magazines and publishers such as the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and Random House. The cover that she did for the New York Times Magazine in 2015 was selected as one of their best photos of the year. Her work is present in many public and private collections around the world. In 2016 she created ‘The Rembrandt Series’ in collaboration with the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam, which Museum also organized an exhibition of this series in the spring of 2016, alongside their exhibition on Rembrandt’s Nudes. In the same year Carla van de Puttelaar was asked by the Maria Austria Institute to reflect on the portraiture of the photographer Maria Austria, which resulted in a new series of portraits and double exhibition of Carla’s photos combined with works by Austria, in the Municipal Archive in Amsterdam. A new monograph of her photographic work, entitled Adornments appeared in October 2017, and in January 2018 Van de Puttelaar was a Jury member for the World Press Photo Contest. In the spring of 2017 Carla van de Puttelaar started her acclaimed portrait series entitled: Artfully Dressed, Women in the Art World. 
Over 400 women worldwide have participated in the project and it continues to grow. In January 2019 61 portraits were exhibited at Sotheby's New York and in the fall of the same year 60 portraits adorned the walls of TEFAF New York. Moreover, five portraits have been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London through a generous grant from the Bern Schwartz Family Foundation. In 2020 she had a retrospective show entitled: Brushed by Light at the National Museum of History and Art in Luxembourg. In 2022 she started the project on women in the EU in collaboration with the Permanent Representation of the Netherlands to the EU.

Carla has taught Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She published several articles on Dutch portraiture of the seventeenth century in Oud Holland and in several exhibition catalogues. In 2012 she was granted a Research Support Grant by the Paul Mellon Centre in London for her research on the Scottish portrait painter David Scougall (1625-1685). Carla van de Puttelaar has been asked regularly to lecture about her photographic work at universities, museums and other venues around the world, and about the subject of her dissertation, such as at the Paul Mellon Centre in London, at the University of Edinburgh and the National Galleries Scotland. In September 2017, she successfully defended her doctoral thesis on Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714 at Utrecht University. Her seminal book based on her PhD was published in 2021 with Brepols Publishers https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503597270-1

Want to know more about the project?

Share by: