Marcel van Balken is a self-taught photographer from the Netherlands for about 40 years. His photography has been published all over the world in photo magazines & books, on calendars, on television and the internet.
He is very active in international photo salons and exhibitions and with his pictures, he has more than 4,000 acceptances and 500 awards achieved in international Photographic Exhibitions.
Marcel moves as a photographer ideally in the field of surrealism and magic realism. He prefers to create composite photographic images inspired by everyday reality combined with his own imagination. He strives to carefully compose photographic compositions of realistic looking scenes in unreal and sometimes magical spheres. As a photographer he is interested in specific themes and conceptual photography. He believes in working thematically with an absolute preference for surrealistic and creative photography. He gives himself a kind of theme or assignment and will not stop making photographs unless he thinks he got everything out of this assignment.
The conceptual pictures and photo series made by Marcel are characterized by some form of control by him. He influences the images so that the photo series expresses what he wants. This influencing can be in the scene to be photographed, but also afterwards, by the use of image manipulation.
With his pictures he wants to tell a story with some level of abstraction: the image is not an explicit example of the concept, but a general expression of the idea. His goal in conceptual photography is to create a concrete image of abstract definition; to take a concept or idea and create a visual representation of it. A way of looking at the world in a completely different, sometimes surrealistic, manner.
His portfolio ‘Lost memories’ is going about buildings in decay, old and no longer inhabited. Characteristic interiors with a rich history, such as a psychiatric hospital, an old sanatorium, an empty chateau and a desolate monastery, abandoned for years. Each photographic scene reminds us of the former residents in a symbolic way, recreated and photographed. The pictures show a surrealistic image of the history of the buildings and its habitants represented by animals. [Official website]
