Angels of Time

Lukas Roels

I studied photography at the Academy of Arts in Ghent, Belgium, before becoming a press photographer for a brief period. I now teach photography at several schools and lead workshops for children, teens and adults. I have been fortunate to work almost exclusively as an artist and I rarely take on commercial work. I have always been more interested in the artistic side of my work as opposed to the commercial side.

I am an old school photographer in the sense that I primarily work in black and white, I use available daylight as my light source, and I do not manipulate my images with software. I believe the creative process is at its zenith at the time the image is captured and I devote all of my energy and experience to that moment. For more than 25 years I have taken nude photographs of children. My choice of subjects has not been without controversy. I have endured criticism, censorship, and more. I continue my work because I believe strongly in the universal beauty of the young body. Children are androgynous beings, one of the themes my work explores. The nudity of children is not sexual, but sensual. They do not hide anything or provoke. They are self-assured and sometimes a tad mischievous, but always innocent. They demand to be watched with one and the same look. For some viewers this is difficult, because the pictures violate their puritanical values. To them, an image of a nude child is not acceptable in any setting, artistic or otherwise.

I think of my photographs of children as light poems, an always imperfect attempt to capture time and beauty. Juxtaposed against dark and rugged backgrounds, the children’s delicate bodies are illuminated in shafts of daylight and surrounded by deep shadows. The personality of each of my models shines through. It is in these moments of creation that I believe my life’s work has been well worth the cost.

As a photographer I have had my share of successes along the way. I have had exhibits in Melbourne in Australia, Krakow in Poland and in my own home town Ghent in Belgium, to name a few. In 2011 I published a hardcover photography book titled Angels of Time. The book includes many of my nude photographs of children and met with both critical success and controversy.

Recently I asked some of these children to pose for me again. But now as young adults. This resulted in a remarkable exposition in Gallery Zebrastraat in Belgium: Our days on Earth. The exhibition showed diptychs, some of them with a difference in age of about 25 years.