After doing publishing work for Luc Derycke, Jan de Vries and Takuma Nakahira, Timothy Stappaerts developed a systemic approach to photography by 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: From forgotten Cajun fishing villages in Louisiana, to hunting grounds in deep Alabama, to white farm settlements in South Africa, to Israel with bi-gender IDF troops and to Uganda envisaging the atrocities committed by the LRA, to the seasonal Eden of orthodox Patmos, to bipolar Bangkok, to the Tuscan re-gentrification of the post-rural landscape, to Montana where he looked for the re- enactment of a documentary photograph, to Eastern Europe from Belgrade to Kiev in search of wounds and the fragile myth of collective sexual gratification, to the cultural vacuity of Fuerteventura, to the anger domain in South-Korea. Permeated with socio-political tension, these settings became backdrops for his models to explore the limits of their bodies.

In 2014, Timothy Stappaerts decided to concentrate on film making by starting the production of a sequence of short films, entitled “Index”, followed by major film projects like “Blue Bush”, for which the field research started in 2005, and “Nacherleben / Liegender weiblicher Akt” in 2018.