Paul Temmerman's Bio

Paul Temmerman was born in Antwerp, Belgium and at the age of 8, he moved with his family to Kinshasa, Congo, Africa. His interest in photography started at a early age as a hobby with taking pictures during school field trips and on safaris in Africa and on numerous vacations to exotic places on family vacations.
After 8 years in Congo, he moved back to Antwerp, completed high school and enrolled in a three-year photography program at The Royal Academy Beaux-Arts of Antwerp. During the school year, he kept busy on weekends shooting weddings and fashion shows. He immediately re-invested the money he earned into more camera and darkroom equipment.

In the early 1980s, his Dad transferred with his company to New York and he saw the perfect opportunity to tag along and discover the U.S. He enrolled in several photography courses at the Parson's school of Design in New York City. At the same time, he freelanced as an assistant for many commercial photographers in the area. One of his highlights was to work for a couple of years, with world famous portrait photographer, Yousuf Karsh, whose major claim to fame is a 1941 picture of Winston Churchill.

In July 1993, he started his own commercial studio in the Chelsea photo district in NYC. At that time, he photographed mostly large format 8x10 and 4x5, but with the increasing prevalence of digital cameras, he began experimenting with this new format. After having used large format cameras for so long, initially it was a strange and sometimes challenging transition, but soon he came to love the control and the ability to perfect the image. Now, for the past 7 years, he mainly shoots digital. When he started his business more than 13 years ago, he never imagined that he would be spending more time in front of a computer, editing, re-touching and manipulating images instead of behind the camera. Often he gets requests from clients to do things that were simply not possible when he was shooting with film. His clients include L'Oreal, American Express, Redken, Johnson & Johnson, Pierre Cardin, Lancome, Janet Sartin, Chivas Regal and Crown Royal, as well as many advertising agencies and design firms.

When time permits, he experiments with subject matter that usually tends to focus on a particular theme. He did a series on streets and objects in the Soho district in NYC, toys of his kids when they were growing up and his most current passion is orchids. The variety of both common and rare species of orchids inspires him to capture their unique blending of colors, distinctive beauty and fragility.

The orchid images are available for purchase as gicleé prints on archival watercolor fine art paper. Gicleé is a French word that means to spray, and is a fine art reproduction printing method. The gicleé method of printmaking produces highly accurate reproductions of original artwork with the look and feel of an original. Gicleé prints are printed with fade-resistant inks or dyes and are of archival quality typically lasting 100 years or more. The fine art photography is reproduced as custom color prints. Every print is signed and dated by him and offered in a limited edition.

Another series that he did several years ago was landmarks of New York City, such as the Empire State, the Twin Towers and the Brooklyn Bridge. He initially shot these images in B&W and later applied them through a color enlarger to 8x10 Polaroid. He then applied an emulsion transfer technique on watercolor paper. It is not an exact science, but the results are different every time and very rewarding. They are unique works of art.

Today he licenses images for all matter of commercial and editorial use and sells fine art prints.
He currently resides with his wife and two children in South Orange, New Jersey.