Tomas van Houtryve

Van Houtryve is a Fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris,[3] an Emeritus member of the VII Photo Agency,[4] a National Geographic Explorer since 2024,[5] and a Contributing Artist for Harper's Magazine.

[8] Van Houtryve next embarked on a seven-year photographic project to document life in the last countries where the Communist Party still remained in power: North Korea, Cuba, China, Nepal, Vietnam, and Laos.

[22] In 2017, the video installation was acquired for the permanent collection of the International Center for Photography with funds provided by Marjorie and Jeffrey Rosen.

The work explores America's collective amnesia of history, addressing the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West.

[25] He paired portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period.

Following the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame de Paris, van Houtryve was selected to photograph and film the damage and reconstruction of the iconic cathedral.

[81] Teacher's guides and lesson plans[82] have been created based on van Houtryve's works by the Pulitzer Center and Stanford University.