trashpup

Fear and Emptiness in Small-Town Australia

Wouter Van de Voorde is a Belgian-born, Canberra-based photographer who admits it doesn’t take much to keep him creatively entertained. When he’s not teaching high school media and photography, he’s driving to the middle of nowhere and photographing forgotten places in rural Australia. His photos are of ordinary things—cars, empty roads, quiet towns—but are somehow infused with an eeriness that occasionally borders on the surreal. Think Twin Peaks if it never rained. We talked to him about feeling solitude while traveling alone for hours on end, and how the artist feels he will be “forever an alien, forever a tourist” while documenting these scattered locales throughout Australia.