Created in collaboration with Kings Island, this project portrays men who grew up without a father figure and are now consciously choosing to parent differently. Not every father has learned how it’s done. Yet each day, these men choose presence, care and safety, giving their children what they themselves went without. Who you become is not fixed by where you come from. Fatherless Fathers shows how these men keep shaping themselves, step by step, and that breaking the cycle is not a grand gesture, but a daily choice.

In this photographic study, people are photographed with a thermal imaging camera. A technology originally developed for military detection and surveillance. The camera makes no distinction between human and animal. It registers heat, and heat alone. Clothing and face become shapes, fields of colour, patterns of warmth. What remains is a silhouette, a heat trace. Camouflage has always been a strategy of disappearance, animals merging into their surroundings, humans wrapping themselves in patterns borrowed from nature. The thermal camera reverses that logic. The social weight, the identity, the story disappears. What conceals becomes visible, what masks becomes form.

By adopting the gaze of the animal, the human becomes the subject of study. The animal has no ego, no self-image. It exists without a story about itself. Where the human defines, categorises and protects itself, the animal is simply present. The pixels and grain of the enlarged prints emphasise that tension. The visible layer of a digital reality that increasingly stands between us and the natural world. Field Study is a response to the work of Tom van Veen, who approaches the nightjar as a carrier of ecological and social relations. Where Van Veen seeks out the bird and learns to look differently, this work reverses that gaze. The human not as observer but as the observed. The animal world offers no answers. It offers a mirror.

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In today's society, amidst a somewhat familiar yet unsettling outlook on the future, countercultures emerge as a vital source of light, championing liberated ideas, styles, and opinions freed from restrictive gender binaries and conservative norms, and fostering a strong sense of collective solidarity built on mutual support and respect. This forms the essential backdrop for No Love Lost, which powerfully documents the Antwerp community around musician and creative Kleine Crack; featuring real individuals, it captures their collective's dark aesthetic, influenced by 1980s Memphis rap, resonating with a contemporary post-punk sensibility while addressing universal themes and the current zeitgeist. 

Photographer Pieter Numan and his team aim to archive characters poised to advance society, as Kleine Crack notes fans are drawn to the darkness in his work as a symbol for the times, yet he and his collective deliberately avoid promoting violence, contrasting with some influences. Inclusivity and the freedom to express oneself are central to this group's unity; they showcase a diverse "potpourri" of expressions, forming a cohesive unit and serving as compelling examples of how individual, yet collective, creative futures for young adults can thrive, ultimately making No Love Lost an intimate and hopeful documentation of contemporary counterculture. In colloboration with Flint Studio.

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