Belinda Van Zanen is an Australian photographer and artist whose practice explores attention, presence, and the relationship between human perception and the natural world.

Her work is grounded in sustained observation rather than the decisive moment, using photography as a way to slow down and remain with experience. Water, light, and movement recur as central motifs, not as spectacle, but as sites of quiet encounter. Through extended periods of looking, Belinda investigates how meaning emerges through duration, repetition, and restraint.

Her current body of work, Ocean as Muse, is a research-based project examining the ocean as both subject and collaborator. Working across digital and analogue processes, the project unfolds through the practice of journaling and embodied observation. Images are shaped by environmental conditions: wind, tide, light, and weather, and are accompanied by handwritten metadata that records these variables as part of the work itself.

Belinda’s broader practice is informed by interests in mindfulness, phenomenology, and the history of photographic observation. She approaches photography not as documentation, but as a way of attending to the world, a process that privileges slowness, uncertainty, and attentiveness over control.

Alongside her artistic practice, Belinda maintains an active writing and research archive, using text as a parallel mode of exploration rather than explanation. Her work has developed through both independent projects and formal study, and continues to evolve through exhibition, publication, and long-term investigation.

She lives and works in Australia.