Rainer Kersten photographs people, places and situations in which context matters.

His images are not born from chasing, but from attention. He chooses a position, reads the space, waits for light, and looks for the moment in which something becomes present enough to be seen.

Light is central to his work, not only as a technical condition, but as a sculpting medium. It can shape a body, open a room, turn a street into a stage, or reveal the traces a place has been carrying for a long time.

When photographing people, Kersten does not start with a pose. He starts with contact: a short conversation, a shared moment, a sense of how someone is present in that particular space. The portrait begins before the camera is raised.

He is interested in the relationship between people and their surroundings: a pianist at her grand piano, a passer-by moving through the structures of Aachen, a body shaped by darkness and light, or a place where human presence is only visible through traces.

The human figure is rarely the only subject. A room, a street, a landscape, a window, a shadow or a structure can be just as important.

His photographs are attempts to make these relationships visible: between light and matter, person and place, presence and absence, what we see and what we sense before we can name it.

Based near Aachen, Maastricht and Hasselt, Kersten works across the border region between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.