Carla van de Puttelaar

Carla van de Puttelaar (born 1 November 1967) is a Dutch fine art photographer and art historian. She holds a PhD in art history from Utrecht University.

Biography
Van de Puttelaar was born in Zaandam, The Netherlands. She attended the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1991 to 1996. She specializes in portrait photography, also portraying nudes. In 2017 she gained her PhD in art history from Utrecht University. She specializes in Dutch and Scottish seventeenth and early eighteenth century portraiture and her seminal book, Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714, was published with Brepols in December 2021. From 2011 to 2014 she taught at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

In 2017, van de Puttelaar started the portrait project Artfully Dressed: Women in the Art World, that consists of over 550 portraits of women in art worldwide, working in different areas of art, representing various ages and cultural backgrounds.

Van de Puttelaar's work has been shown in museums and other venues around the world, and in 2020 she had a retrospective show entitled: Brushed by Light at the National Museum of History and Art in Luxembourg, consisting of 78 works and spanning 22 years. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalog with an introduction by the eminent art historian Rudi Ekkart. In 2021 she collaborated with Iris van Herpen which resulted in the project and exhibition entitled: Synergia.

Van de Puttelaar currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Work
Like the works of other contemporary Dutch photographers, such as Rineke Dijkstra, Hellen van Meene and Desiree Dolron, van de Puttelaar's works show influences of Dutch Golden Age painting in their composition, use of light and color, and rendering of textures and surfaces.

To achieve her photographic effects, van de Puttelaar utilizes film, but in more recent years also uses digital photography. Several of her works are untitled, enhancing the effect of alienation, while retaining an element of eroticism.

Recognition
Van de Puttelaar has won several prizes and awards, including the Dutch Prix de Rome Basic Prize. She gained international recognition following exhibitions in for example New York, Paris and Brussels. Her works have been published as book covers and in magazines like The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. In 2009, she ranked 51st in the top 100 of Dutch artists as published by Elseviers Magazine and in 2018, 2019 and 2023, she was a semi-finalist in the Artist of the Year contest of Dutch artists organized by Stichting Kunstweek.