Pieter de Koninck was born on Long Island, New York, and spent his childhood between Mexico, France, and Belgium. An itinerant upbringing that left him, by his own account, always looking at places as an outsider first. When he returned to the States as a young man, he settled in Los Angeles, where an early job was as a graphic designer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, then still one of the city's major dailies.
From there he moved into advertising, spending the late 1980s and the decades that followed as a Senior Art Director and Associate Creative Director at major agencies, working on campaigns for both international and local clients. It was a career built on other people’s stories and other people’s products...forty years of it.
When he retired, he didn't slow down; he turned back to his own eye. Photography, and film photography in particular since 2017, became the practice he’d been circling for four decades. In 2020, Regal House published The Purpose of Things, a collaboration with the late poet Peter Serchuk pairing forty of de Koninck’s photographs with Serchuk’s poems — released just weeks before pandemic lockdowns reshaped how the world encountered books, but a quiet success nonetheless.
Since then, his photographs have appeared in a range of physical and virtual group exhibitions — including at Arles and the Griffin Museum of Photography— and in publications such as Dodho, SHOTS, All About Photo, and Edge of Humanity. He continues to work primarily in medium format black-and-white film, based in Los Angeles.
Collections
International Museum of Dance
Group Exhibitions
2026 Memory: What Remains, TCG Gallery, NYC, online exhibition
2026 The 2026 Still Life Exhibition, Lenscratch, online exhibition
2026 Surrealism 2026, TCG Gallery, NYC, online exhibition
2026 Expand and Contract: American Documentary Photography in the 21st Century, Los Angeles Center of Photography. Juror Rotem Rozental.
2026 Arles Off | Worlds In View, Recontres d’Arles Pro Week, Les Murs Blancs Gallery, Arles, France.
2026 16th Self-Published Photobook Exhibition (for South of Pico), Griffin Museum of Photography. Juror Crista Dix.
2026 Urban, Suburban, Rural, NYC4PA, Honorable Mention. Juror Paula Tognarelli.
2026 Celebrating Los Angeles, The Hive Gallery, Los Angeles
2025 Behind The Glitter, Washington Corridor Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2025 International Museum of Dance, Duncan Miller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2025 Nude Geographies, Praxis Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2025 Love Letter to Los Angeles, Era Studio, Los Angeles, 2 photos
2025 International Museum of Dance Collection, Duncan Miller Gallery, Los Angeles
2025 Places and Spaces, Decagon Gallery, New York, online exhibition. Juror Matthew Christopher.
2025 Apparel, NYC4PA, New York. Honorable Mention. Juror Niamh Treacy
2025 The Modern Nude, SE Center for Photography, Greenville, SC, online exhibition, 3 photos
2025 Diptych, Praxis Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2025 Portraiture: Unveiling Identity, PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury VT, online exhibition, 2 photos. Juror Jeff Curto.
2025 Monochrome, PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury VT, online exhibition. Juror Douglas Beasley.
2024 Monochrome, NYC4PA, New York. Juror Selection. Juror Nancy Ori.
2024 Primary Colors, NYC4PA, New York. Honorable Mention. Juror Louise Fedotov-Clements.
2024 Echoes of the Unconscious, TAG Gallery, Los Angeles.
2024 Snapshot America: A Portrait of the United States, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts.
2024 Your Daily Photograph, September 26. Duncan Miller Gallery Square Print Sale.
2024 Wandering Curves, NYC4PA, New York. Second Place. Juror Darren Ching, KLOMPCHING Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.
2024 Soul of Your City, Fabrik Projects, LA Art Show 2024.
2023 Spring, Chateau Gallery, Lexington, KY, online exhibition.
2022 Portrait: Self and Others, PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury VT, online exhibition. Juror Aline Smithson.
2022 The Surreal, Chateau Gallery, Lexington, KY, online exhibition.
2022 Black and White and All the Greys Between, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, juror Eric Kunsman.
2022 The Everyday Landscape, PhotoSC, juror Lisa Hostetler, former curator George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
2021 Surrealism: The Unusual and the Subversive, PhotoSC, juror Natalie Dupecher, Assistant Curator of Modern Art at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
2021 Your Daily Photograph, July 3, 2021 and July 6, 2022. Duncan Miller Gallery
2021 16th Pollux Awards, Barcelona, Spain, 3 photos
2021 Six Feet: Boundaries, Belonging & Becoming, Revolve Gallery, Asheville, NC
2019 Radical Beauty, Malibu Rising, Malibu City Hall, Malibu, CA
2018 Santa Monica College Juried Exhibition
2017 Lens Op De Mens International Fotofestival, Overpelt, Belgium, 2 photos
Competitions
2025 Photo Review Competition, online exhibition, juror Peter Fetterman, 2 photos
2023 Dodho Magazine Nude Photography Awards, Finalist
2021 Photo Review Competition, Winner’s Gallery, juror Christopher James
2021 16th Pollux Awards, Barcelona, Spain: 3rd Place, Still Life, Single; Honorable Mention, Black & White, Single; Honorable Mention, Nude & Figure, Single
2019 International Photo Awards, One Shot: Street Photography: People: Honorable Mention
2017 I Shot It Black & White Competition, Mark of Excellence
2017 I Shot It Street Photo Competition, Mark of Excellence
2017 LensCulture Street Photography Awards, Competition Gallery
2017 LensCulture Portrait Awards, Competition Gallery
Publications
2026 Stories Found in Ordinary Street Moments online feature in Edge of Humanity magazine
2024 Night Timin’ published by Domino Press
2023 Nude, published by Dodho Magazine
2022 SHOTS Magazine, Issue No. 156: Self Portraits, p. 40
2021 SHOTS Magazine, Issue No. 152: Secret Worlds, p. 19
2020 The Purpose of Things (with poems by Peter Serchuk), Regal House
2019 Dodho Magazine, online feature on the project Synchronicity or the Choreography of Chance (11/11/2019)
2018 L’Oeil de la Photographie, Holiday Pictures (July 16 & August 29)
Artist’s Statement
I photograph the California coast and the American Southwest, though it often feels less like I choose the subject than the subject finds me. A scene stops me before I know why.
My pictures can look, at first, like mundane fragments of a day. A parked car, a shuttered stall, a hand descending into darkness. They are not. I am not interested in documenting a story or elevating the everyday into something it isn’t. I meet things on their own terms, and every so often, in that meeting, something enigmatic surfaces.
Across subjects, figures, still life, street, landscape, I keep returning to the same register: quiet, a little unsettled, dryly witty rather than declarative. I'm drawn to incongruity, to objects and moments that don't quite resolve into a single meaning. I'd rather leave a question standing than close it. My photographs are less about what happened than about the pause after. The beat between words, where nothing has been decided yet.
Pieter de Koninck
pieter_de_k@yahoo.com