About

Johannes Pretorius is a photographer and information architect based in northern England. He makes commissioned and personal photography projects, and consults on software products at ExaDev, drawing on his experience in product management, domain analysis, information presentation, and data visualisation.

Statement

I am drawn to subjects too complex to take in at a glance, from the behaviour of cells to the economics of a landscape. My recent work examines the tension between economic viability and environmental sustainability in agriculture, industry, and culture.

I start by learning enough of the field to speak its language, and by finding out what the subject is really about. Then I look for the structure underneath: where things that seem different turn out to be the same, and where things stand in tension with each other. My aim is to help the viewer see that structure. I make an artefact such as an analysis, a conceptual model, a prototype, or a photographic series, test it, and cut whatever does not help. I revisit it until the result is coherent.

Biography

Johannes Pretorius began his career in management consulting, moved into data visualisation research in 2004, with a doctorate from Eindhoven University of Technology (2008), and began photographing seriously in 2013.

His photography has been exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society, Open Eye Gallery, FORMAT photography festival, and Abbot Hall gallery. It has been published in The Guardian, featured in We Feed the UK (Papadakis, 2025), and written about in the peer-reviewed journal Arts (2026). He has received support from Arts Council England, the Gaia Foundation, and Signal Film and Media. Prints are held in the permanent collection at Lakeland Arts and in private collections.

His research was published in journals including IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Computer Graphics Forum, and BMC Bioinformatics. It was supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Leeds, and carried out with biologists at Cardiff University School of Medicine and bioinformaticians at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.