Murae Van Reede Van Oudtshoorn is a London-based South African fine art photographer specialising in camera-less photography. She received a BA Hons in Photography from the Durban University of Technology, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.After many years working in advertising, she gradually...
Read MoreMurae Van Reede Van Oudtshoorn is a London-based South African fine art
photographer specialising in camera-less photography. She received a BA
Hons in Photography from the Durban University of Technology,
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
After many years working in
advertising, she gradually found her way back to photography, drawn not
to the technical precision of the camera, but to the raw, unpredictable
nature of alternative processes. She began experimenting with Chemigrams
and Polaroids, pulling apart and reimagining traditional materials to
explore something more instinctive, more emotional.
Her work is
rooted in personal experience- injury, disorientation, loss, and shaped by
a fascination with memory and how it shifts over time. After a
concussion, she became acutely aware of how fragile and fluid memory can
be, not just emotionally, but neurologically. Thoughts slipped, time
bent, faces became unfamiliar. That sense of instability now runs
through much of her work. She’s drawn to themes of impermanence and
transformation: how things fall apart, come together, blur, or vanish.
Much of her process embraces unpredictability, using chemicals, time, and
physical manipulation to let images emerge rather than be constructed.
Faces and figures often surface partially, like memories on the edge of
clarity, never quite fixed, always in flux.
There’s a tension in
her work between holding on and letting go, between trying to preserve
something and allowing it to change. She uses materials that are meant
to capture and contain, and disrupts them, reflecting the
way memory and emotion can distort even the sharpest moments. What
results is often abstract, sometimes haunting, and always deeply felt.
Through
these visual fragments, Murae invites viewers into a quiet space of
reflection, on memory, identity, loss, and the strange beauty that can be
found in what remains.
Her work was first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in London in 2019 and more recently at the Cluster London Photography Fair in 2025.
