Born in Belgium, Niels Devisscher is a Berlin-based fine art photographer, writer, and visual artist. His work has been awarded in international competitions, including The Prix de La Photographie Paris (2020), and has appeared in various magazines. Since 2022, Niels has worked with select organizations responding to the climate emergency and ecological crises as an independent communications designer and visual artist.

Niels has been fascinated with the living world from a young age. “Armed with a microscope and entomology book, I regularly went in search of insects in the fields and fallow plots of land in our neighborhood.” This fascination soon evolved into a calling to affirm nature’s beauty, prompting him to pick up photography at the age of 15. His early work captured the wonder of nature reclaiming urban buildings left to decay. Later, his focus shifted to fine art landscape photography, inspired by the likes of Michael Kenna and Rohan Reilly. Niels’ most recognized images feature characteristic trees, sea stacks, and mountains, often isolated and veiled in fog. “In hindsight, what I’ve been after are the unseen forces. The mystery from which all life emerges. Through minimalist compositions, I tune into the essence of my subjects. The negative space around them allows their essential energy to fill the frame and make contact with the viewer.”

The image Tristesse (2017) — which went on to win bronze in the Prix de La Photographie Paris (2020) and a photo excursion to the Arctic with DigifotoPro (2018) — is a notable example of that. In it, a birch is covered in snow up to its crown. Bent over, the crown resembles the head of a person, consumed by a sense of melancholy. It hints at the capability of other-than-human beings to experience feelings. Perhaps it was a precognition of what Niels would explore many years later in his essay *Your Grief Belongs to the Earth,* asking, “What if we’re tuning into topographies of feelings that exceed us?”

In 2021, Niels moved to Berlin and started working with a mental wellness impact fund. This coincided with his growing awareness of the mental health crisis and climate emergency. The visual identity he developed for the fund continues to generate ripples in the industry. It also alchemized a new visual language — drawing from myth and folklore and combining digital and analog collage. The worlds Niels builds move beyond engineered reality and synthesize desirable futures where humans live in alignment and coherence with companion species. In his visual language, humans reside in trees and butterflies and fungi outsize humans, materializing into what he calls “Ecological Surrealism”.

Niels’ art is informed not only by his lived experience, but also by his family and nature writers like David Abram, Andreas Weber, Robin Wall Kimmerer; psychologists including Francis Weller, James Hillman, and Gabor Maté; and poets such as Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and David White. “I am forever grateful to my mom and grandfather for giving me the sensitivity to find beauty in a blade of grass and the petals of a flower, and for my dad to give me the gift of story and imagination. And I am thankful to these authors for being soul guides and elders in a largely elderless culture.”

Since 2022, Niels has been working as an independent visual artist and communications designer. Together with his fiancé and co-founder, Rūta Žemčugovaitė he founded Sympoeisis — an experience and design lab for regenerative futures. They have since welcomed more than a hundred participants in their multi-species imagination and storytelling workshops, and their practice has been included in Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s the Collective Imagination Toolkit. Only a year later, Niels joined forces with Emilie Grau and Jean-Philippe Steeger to build re:storied — the regenerative communications agency. Working with pioneers including Transition Network, Regenerators, Really Regenerative CIC, otherWise, and the Centre for Climate Psychology, Niels’ art and strategic design work continues to color and shape the regenerative movement.

Today, Niels’ photography practice has expanded into film. His analog photographs capture the texturality and rawness of the living world and its shifting seasons. They recognize the landscape and its inhabitants as mythical, overflowing with life and story, and always speaking to and through us.

Niels is continuously learning and experimenting with new approaches. Yet the undercurrent to his career is a deep commitment to creating the conditions conducive to life. “Sometimes it only takes a conversation, a photograph, a poem, or collage to remind people of who they are: agential, wild, alive; a member of a beautiful, mysterious, and enchanted planet. The earth’s soul is calling us back. We can’t forget to respond. Not this time.”