Ryan Koopmans

Country: Canada 🇨🇦

Ryan Koopmans (BA, MFA) is a Dutch Canadian lens-based artist interested in the built environment and the societies that are shaped by those environments.
Born in Amsterdam (1986) he was raised on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada, completed his undergraduate education at UBC in Vancouver, and in 2012 received a Masters of Fine Art in Photography, Video & Related Media at The School of Visual Arts in New York City.
His undergraduate degree in the interdisciplinary practices of geography, art history, and psychology formed the basis for his interest in architecture and the communities living in that architecture.
Koopmans is primarily drawn to photographing surreal structures in our world’s megacities and urban landscapes. Formal qualities in their geometry, repetition, and saturation help him illustrate what he terms ‘the poetry of form in interesting locations.’
In essence, his work documents the points of intersection where the natural and manmade converge. He credits his upbringing on Canada’s rugged West Coast, where distances and vistas are vast, as to why he often photographs from a removed perspective, embracing a large sense of scale.
Currently based in Stockholm, Sweden, the majority of the year Koopmans travels around the world for both personal and assigned photography & video projects.