Pieter Henket is a Dutch photographer living and working in New York City.
Born into a family of artists, Henket’s early fascination with film and photography was bolstered when he moved there in 1998 to enroll in a three-months documentary filmmaking course at New York University. Soon thereafter he began interning for the director Joel Schumacher, where Henket learned staging and production.
Time spent experimenting in the studio and doing portraits of friends and strangers in equal measure resulted in editorial work for magazines such as Esquire. His photograph of Lady Gaga was used for the album cover of “The Fame” (2008), which sold over 15 million copies worldwide. The photograph was included in the exhibition "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2010.
Pieter Henket is known for a photographic style that takes inspiration from the 17th century Dutch Golden Age of painting. In this series, "Birds of Mexico", Henket presents portraits of a cross section of these revolutionaries that puts a spotlight on the flourishing of free expression at the heart of this movement. Through illuminating and vivid black and white portraiture, Henket collaborates with a new generation of Mexicans to share with the world their individual ways of breaking bonds that constrain their true identities.
Costumed in the garments, fabrics, and accoutrements of traditional Mexican and Catholic icons along with Indigenous cultural references – the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus, the masks of the Lucha Libre, the uniform of the Matador, the basket of flores of the Mexican flower vendor – they do not reject these identities, but expand, redefine, and open them up to new ways of thinking. The result is a collective work of art by representatives of this new generation, Henket, and a creative team from the region -- led by Chino Castilla -- that symbolizes and celebrates this evolution.