Projects

An intimate portrait of a boy growing up in Ely, Nevada.

“AMERICAN” is a collection of audio, film and photographic portraits. The series was created in the US between 2022 and 2024. De Puy's images invite us to look closer at and listen to the stories of a cross-section of people who make up one of the world’s most powerful, extreme and divisive countries, at a politically turbulent and poignant time.

Waters is photographer Robin de Puy's deeply personal exploration of memory, loss, and resilience in the aftermath of the 1953 North Sea Flood. Commissioned by the municipality of Goeree-Overflakkee, De Puy returned to the island where she grew up—specifically the village of Oude-Tonge—to portray people whose lives were shaped by one of the greatest natural disasters in Dutch history.

Robin de Puy (b. 1986) has lived for several years in Wormer, a small village surrounded by water just north of Amsterdam. Drawn throughout her career to the mythology and visual language of the American countryside, she discovered during the pandemic that the landscape on her own doorstep held a strikingly similar sense of mystery and possibility. The same distinctive characters, quiet rituals, and local landmarks she had long sought across rural America were, unexpectedly, close to home.

In 2015, Robin de Puy took a 12,000 km solo road trip across the United States on a Harley-Davidson. Travelling without a fixed route, she toured the country seeking out distinctive faces to photograph – people of all ages encountered along the way. De Puy resisted constructing a narrative around social contrasts or the dichotomy between urban America and the country’s vast, unpopulated landscapes. Instead, the work unfolds as a sequence of encounters, where each image stands on its own terms, unbound by a prescribed framework. The photographs that emerged from this journey, accompanied by excerpts from her travel journal, were published in the book If This Is True, I’ll Never Have to Leave Home Again. The series was also presented in a major solo exhibition at the Hague Museum of Photography. The journey itself was documented by Simone de Vries and Maarten van Rossem; the resulting film was nominated for an International Emmy Award in 2017.