Peter Bruyns

From experimenting with various art forms and techniques such as etching, linocut and lithography to drawing and painting, creative processes of self expression and personal interpretation were important factors in Bruyns' development and approach to art.

After graduating high school in 1999, looking for inspiration to marry his various interests, he spent a year working and traveling through Europe where various experiences led him to architecture and completing his Architectural masters at the University of Cape Town in 2007. This is where Bruyns discovered photography, after a friend immigrating to Australia gifted him an old film camera, and how through using a variety of formats, analogue and digital, and on camera techniques such as movement, black carding, light painting or adjusted exposure times each photograph could become a unique statement of expression not limited to simple representation.


His interest in incorporating techniques that could result in abstraction were further inspired by a piece of writing by the philosopher Hegel, who when looking at architecture, classified it as the lowest form of the arts as it used the most means to convey its expression and poetry as the highest form as it potential use of simple sounds relied on the listeners engagement and own experience to find completion. In photography Bruyns found a similar challenge, using a medium of literal recording and reproduction in a way that could engage the user to find its completion.

After a decade of architectural practice, and completing a number of large commercial projects around the end of 2017, Bruyns decided to pursue his other passion, photographic art full time.