After doing publishing work for Luc Derycke, Jan de Vries and Takuma Nakahira, Timothy Stappaerts developed a systemic approach to photography when debuting with a study of gorillas in their natural habitat in Gabon in 2005. Parallel to this, the greater share of Stappaerts’ work focuses on depicting humans in their physicality, and through this, analysing and deconstructing status and consumption of the reproduced image of the body.

While based in Brussels, New York and Paris, his projects continued to expand on recognitions of the human subject within a landscape, traveling to often isolated, interstitial spaces of nature and industry throughout the world. Sites permeated with socio-political tension, these settings became backdrops for his models to explore the limits of their bodies. The series of photographs resulting from this work, made between 2008 and 2014, is entitled Terre et Loisir : Études kinésiques régénératrices chez les jeunes femmes.

In 2014, Timothy Stappaerts shifted his practice toward filmmaking, initiating a sequence of short films, collectively titled Index. This process expanded into a phase of conceptual development, including collaborations with Pier Luigi Tazzi on the feature film Quatre Essais Situés in 2020, currently in preproduction and based on field research initiated in 2005.