Nic Keller, a Swiss fine art photographer, has forged an extraordinary path in the world of photography, blending nostalgia with modernity to create strikingly surreal black-and-white works. Her journey began in her mother’s darkroom, where the alchemy of analog photography first captured her imagination.
Nic’s distinctive style is characterized by high contrasts, evocative silhouettes, and the poetic presence of birds, all set against vast, open spaces. These elements weave a unique visual language that invites viewers into otherworldly realms filled with emotion and intrigue. For Nic, photography is more than a medium―it is a means of storytelling, atmosphere-building, and connecting deeply with her audience.

Your work is incredibly evocative and unique. How did you first get into fine art photography, and what drew you to photo manipulation as a complement to your practice?

Thank you for the compliment! My journey to fine art photography began with my fascination for storytelling. I was interested in how a single image could convey emotions and messages from an early age. Photography was my first step in capturing and sharing my visions. Photo manipulation came into play when I was looking for ways to transcend the boundaries of reality. It enabled me to create images that depict reality, my experiences, emotions, and dreams. It's like painting with pixels, creating new perspectives and expressing my creativity. This combination of photography and manipulation allows me to tell visual stories and immerse the viewers of my pictures in my world.


Your preference for black and white imagery is striking. What is it about this palette that appeals to you, and how does it enhance the emotional impact of your work?

Black and white images fascinate me with their timelessness. By reducing the colour palette, I direct the focus to the essential elements of the image, removing distractions and allowing the viewer's gaze to be explicitly drawn to the composition, shapes, contrasts and details. Concentrating on light and composition will enable me to enhance the visual effect without colour influencing perception. Black and white images are classic and elegant, creating a deeper connection between the work and the viewer, regardless of current trends.
With light, shadow and contrasts, I create a unique atmosphere that intensely affects the viewer's feelings, reinforcing the dramaturgy and drawing the viewer directly into the mood.
Black and white represent opposites, such as light and darkness, life and death, or hope and despair. I use these opposites to give my work depth and meaning, allowing the viewer room for individual interpretation and stimulating their imagination. Black-and-white images offer a good opportunity for abstraction to enable new perspectives. I have always liked this option to give my work the desired message.
Black-and-white photography evokes the early days of photography and has a retro charm that I really like. Through the chosen design of my pictures, I have created a uniform style that gives my work recognition value and combines my pictures into a coherent overall work.

Birds and clouds are recurring motifs in your compositions. Can you tell us more about the symbolism behind these elements?

Motifs such as birds, clouds and silhouettes can be found in my pictures. For me, they are not only aesthetic elements but also narrative and creative tools that enrich my pictorial composition and enhance the emotional impact of my works. They open up numerous possibilities for me to guide the viewer's gaze and intensify the picture's message, and they often evoke similar associations in them, as they are universally understandable. In this way, they create a common language to explore themes such as freedom, transience or identity.
With a bird in flight, for example, I symbolise the longing or hope for freedom or the lightness of flight, while clouds often convey change, vastness, or transience. Both birds and clouds bring movement to static scenes and thus create tension in the picture. The small black silhouettes complement these elements. I use them to create clear accents that strengthen the composition and draw the viewer into the picture.
But combining all the elements is also important: I use the clouds to create soft transitions, emphasise the play of light and heighten the drama. The birds as moving elements direct the eye through the picture, and the silhouette of a person as a static element in the picture is integrated into the scene and observes it simultaneously. In this way, I simultaneously create a surreal and poetic atmosphere, blurring the boundaries between reality and fantasy. By consciously integrating my motifs, I make my photos more complex and intensify their emotional and visual impact.
In addition, the depiction of my motifs enables me to emphasise contrasts and, thus, for example, to highlight the contrast between urban and natural elements or to achieve a balance between light and dark areas, which should give my pictures a balanced and harmonious effect.


The small silhouettes of people in your photos add a distinct narrative element. What do these figures represent to you?

The tiny silhouettes of people in my photos are a central part of the narrative, a strong visual element, and a narrative tool. They combine universal themes with individual interpretations and enrich my photography with their versatility, emotionality, and creative clarity.
Depending on the composition and story of the photo, I use either individual silhouettes or groups that symbolise either isolation or community. Individual figures often emphasise loneliness, for example, in my picture 'Alone' or self-reflection. At the same time, groups of silhouettes convey cohesion or dynamism, such as in the picture 'Walking to the light'. I encourage people to consider the relationship between people and space, identity and belonging.
I usually depict the silhouettes on a small scale in relation to their surroundings, thus showing how tiny people are in comparison to the world. Yet their significance and presence are strongly emphasised. They are depicted as visual accents, structure the space, and immediately attract the viewer's attention. This creates a clear visual hierarchy that lends depth to the composition.
I also use silhouettes to depict the relationship between people and their surroundings, the monumentality of urban landscapes or the abstract nature of an idea. They symbolise loneliness, vulnerability, strength or curiosity. Through their small representation, I can emphasise the size of the world around them and invite the viewer to place themselves in the scene.
Silhouettes are reduced to the essentials, which reinforces their symbolic effect. Without recognisable details or faces, they act like blank canvases for the viewer, offering a projection surface for human experiences, creating a balance between closeness and distance and inviting identification. Using the silhouettes in my paintings, I try to use this projection surface to depict a tension between the role of the human being as part of a larger whole and as an independent being with a unique story.
For me, the silhouettes live from the interplay between light and shadow. They not only emphasise the contrast but also make the light itself an actor in my pictures. The interplay of darkness and brightness creates depth and reinforces the narrative effect of my works. Their abstraction lends the silhouettes a mysterious quality and is intended to generate questions in the viewer, such as 'Who are these figures?' or 'What are they thinking?'. In this way, I invite the viewer to engage more intensively with my pictures and to linger with them for longer.

How do you balance your roles as an artist and an educator? Do these roles influence each other?

I work full-time at a university. This activity requires a lot of concentration and a lot of time. For this reason, the biggest challenge is dividing my time between the two activities. Performing both roles requires good time management and clear prioritisation. Finding this balance is often tricky, and I sometimes succeed better and sometimes worse. I mainly use my holidays to work on my paintings. To create a new picture, you need time, calm, and reflection. Only with enough time, peace, and quiet can I develop new creative ideas for a new picture and find the necessary vigour to work them out properly in Photoshop.
My work as an artist gives me a cognitive distance from my job, whose unanswered questions often keep me busy long into the evening. Working on my pictures lets me concentrate on something else with great pleasure. It allows me to immerse myself in a new subject, engage with it more intensively, and live out all my creativity through photo manipulation. I can create, inspire, convey messages, think differently, adopt new perspectives, and find creative solutions.
In turn, the cognitive distance from my work gives me enough energy to tackle my job's challenges and deal with them creatively.


Your images often touch the viewer deeply. What do you hope people take away from your work?

My pictures trigger something in people - be it an emotion, a memory or simply a moment of pause. Art is a dialogue, a silent conversation between the work and the viewer. My works should not only be seen but also felt.
A central wish is that viewers can find themselves in my pictures. The themes I work on — such as loneliness, hope, connection, or beauty in the everyday — are universal human experiences. If someone stands in front of one of my paintings and feels reflected in it or connects their own story with it, then I have achieved my goal.
I also want to encourage people to see the world with new eyes. I often show familiar scenes or elements in an unusual context to show that there is something extraordinary in the everyday. These perspective changes are intended to inspire viewers to take a closer look at their own lives and perceive them more consciously.
Above all, however, I hope that my pictures create a space—a space for reflection, calm, and perhaps also solace. In our often hectic world, art takes people out of their everyday lives for a moment and connects them with something bigger and more profound.

Can you walk us through your creative process when starting a new piece? How do you conceptualize and bring your ideas to life?

For me, creating a picture begins with collecting the most diverse impressions I capture on my forays with my camera. I photograph everything that could later serve as the basis for my photo manipulations. I find inspiration in the most minor details: an object, a special play of light, a conversation, an emotion, an experience, or a memory can be the initial spark for a new work. In this way, each of my paintings reflects a part of me and my life.
I initially recorded my ideas in sketches and notes. While collecting the sketches on my iPad, I save the photos on my computer. I often let both rest for weeks or months until a more precise concept develops. This period of waiting and reflection is crucial for me to capture the essence of an idea before turning it into an image.
When I finally tackle a painting, I ask myself what mood or message I want to convey. My sketches help me to build on original ideas, review visual concepts and develop them further. This process is rarely linear. I often work on several pictures simultaneously and let individual works rest for a long time before I continue working on them again. I even discard some works completely if they do not correspond to my ideas or do not reflect my aesthetic.
In my work, I combine intuitive approaches with structured approaches, leaving plenty of room for spontaneity. Often, the best moments come when I detach myself from the original idea and let the creative process run free. At the same time, I always keep the narrative line in mind to ensure that the work remains coherent.
At the end of each process, I ask myself the crucial questions: 'Does the picture touch me? Does it tell the story I wanted to tell?' The work is complete when I can answer these questions with a clear 'yes'.
For me, this process is like a journey. I know where I'm starting from, but the twists, turns, and discoveries often surprise me. Challenges like creative blocks are part of it, but I trust the process will take me further. With time and patience, I find new perspectives that enrich and develop my work.


Photo manipulation allows you to blend reality and imagination. How do you decide the balance between these two elements in your work?

The balance between reality and fantasy in my photo manipulations is central to my creative process. It's not just about the technical realisation but the emotional impact and the story I want to tell with each image.
Initially, I think about how much of the 'real' world I want to preserve in the picture. All the objects I photograph come from my immediate surroundings and correspond to reality. I combine and organise these real elements in my photographs in such a way that they make the story I want to tell tangible. I use reality as a basis to guide the viewer into a familiar world before inviting them to immerse themselves in the realms of fantasy. In a way, reality exists twice in my work: on the one hand, as what I capture photographically, and on the other, as a story that draws on life and can, therefore, touch the viewer.
It is particularly important to me to depict the real world in a way that remains credible while at the same time offering space for my own thoughts and interpretations. This creates a connection between the familiar and the imaginary, which gives the pictures depth and makes them thought-provoking.
One technique I often use is the manipulation of proportions and scale. When I enlarge or reduce real objects, this creates a surreal effect without losing the underlying reality. For example, in the picture 'Cycling in the forest', a cyclist rides through an oversized forest, which is intended to stimulate the imagination without appearing unnatural. I make sure that the transitions between reality and fantasy are fluid, as in this example with the overly tall trees and the mystical light with fog, which gives the picture a dramatic mood that interacts seamlessly with the real world by picking up on the discomfort and loneliness in a dense forest.
The integration of fantasy is gradual. I usually start with a real object, such as a tree or a door, and transform it. By changing light and shadow, distorting perspectives or adding other objects whose combination does not exist in the real world, the image becomes more and more detached from reality. My painting 'Civilisation - No More Space for Nature' is a vivid example of this approach. The starting point was blocks of flats, which I digitally expanded and gave an abstract, oversized height. These monumental buildings stand on an inverted forest, symbolically representing civilisation's suppression and displacement of nature.

How has your artistic style evolved over the years, and what influences have shaped this evolution?

My artistic style has developed naturally over the years and has been shaped by many influences. One of the most important influences was my father, who had a passion for abstract art. Inspired by the artist Picasso, he painted his pictures with oil paint in his spare time and practised his hobby alongside his professional work. As a child, I was allowed to observe his works and immerse myself in his creative process. This early exposure to art shaped my perception of images and forms and impacted my artistic development. I was fascinated not only by the results of his work but also by the creative process and the freedom to play with colours and shapes.
As a teenager, I discovered my enthusiasm for photography, especially for analogue technology. I remember wandering the streets with an old camera, capturing the world through the lens and developing the photographs in my parents' darkroom. This process was more than a technical skill for me - it was a creative act that showed me how to create emotional and visual experiences by playing with light and shadow.
Photography took a back seat over time, mainly due to my education, work commitments and family. However, this phase enabled me to develop new perspectives and rethink the meaning of art in my life. It led to a maturing of my artistic identity and a more intensive reflection on my form of expression.
The digital possibilities finally opened up new ways for me to develop techniques such as photo manipulation and digital collage, which today form an essential part of my work. The transition from analogue to digital photography was an exciting journey that expanded my technical skills and changed my perspective on art. Digital processing allowed me to combine elements that would not have been possible before and create new worlds that emerged from both my perception of reality and my imagination.
My artistic style has evolved from a classical, almost documentary approach to a more experimental and surreal approach. The interplay of reality and fantasy is the result of all those influences and experiences - from my early encounter with my father's abstract art to my discoveries and return to photography through digital techniques.


What upcoming projects or themes are you excited to explore in your future work?

In my future work, I would like to continue dealing with themes that touch on my personal history and human experiences and enable me to visualise feelings and inner states. I am inspired by my own experiences and my immediate surroundings, which provide me with ideas for my pictures.
One theme that I would like to explore further is the relationship between man and nature. I am particularly interested in how people interact with their natural environment, how they influence it and how nature shapes us as individuals and as a society. In my work, I want to capture nature's beauty and address the challenges and tensions that arise from human impact on the environment. I will explore this on a local level (individual landscapes and urban environments) and a global level (global environmental issues). I have already created some images on this theme, such as my work 'Tree in the Rain', which addresses the problem of Switzerland's very dry and warm summer.
I am also fascinated by the themes of time and transience and the traces they leave behind, as well as the metamorphosis of cities and urban landscapes. In my work, I plan to use melting forms, decaying buildings, or figures that fade into sand or fog. To realise these concepts, I will have to explore the limits of photo manipulation and develop new techniques. This is an exciting challenge that will stretch me both technically and creatively—a task I am very enthusiastic about.
I look forward to exploring these themes further in my future work, aiming to make viewers think and open up an emotional dialogue.