Winter Vandenbrink has spent the last two years building a body of work composed from distance: the gap between a long lens and a stranger who doesn't know they’re being watched. WOLVES, his third book with IDEA following VANDALS and TOBY, is where that distance begins to collapse. 

Where VANDALS examined the visible codes of male youth – clothing, style, gesture – WOLVES is interested in something less tangible. The photographs no longer ask what these boys wear so much as how they move. “I’ve always been interested in the togetherness of groups," the Dutch-born, Paris-based photographer explains. "Even when I was describing the behaviour of the individual, they always belonged to a certain kind of group.”

That preoccupation with collectivity echoes one of the book’s central ideas. Wolves are rarely understood as solitary creatures. They are observed through relationships, through formations, through collective behaviour. The same could be said of adolescence. Vandenbrink’s subjects drift through the streets of Europe’s capitals in loose alliances, constantly negotiating their place within a larger group, finding identity not through individuality, but through proximity to others. That same refusal of singularity runs through One or Several Wolves?, a text by psychoanalytic philosophers Deleuze and Guattari which is reprinted at the back of the book: “You can’t be one wolf, you’re always eight or nine, six or seven.”

WOLVES was not conceived as a project from the outset. The earliest photograph in the book dates from around 2008; the most recent was taken in Venice just two months ago. “VANDALS is more portrait-heavy, more about the individual,” Vandenbrink says. “This one is really about the individual contra group — or vice versa.” Rather than setting out to make a book about wolves, he excavated one from nearly 15 years of photographs. Working with his partner, Erjan, an art historian who first introduced him to Deleuze and Guattari’s text, he began revisiting the archive before passing a selection to designer Linda van Deursen. “She first made a certain kind of selection for herself,’ he says, "based on the characteristics of the wolf – trekking, or packs, or resting, or howling, or playfulness.” From there, recurring behaviours and visual rhythms began to emerge. Yet, rather than allowing the book to read as a taxonomy, van Deursen ultimately disrupted that structure. “It became more like an art photography book,” Vandenbrink says. 

Distance, for Vandenbrink, was never just a technical choice. Early on, he relied heavily on long lenses, maintaining a degree of separation from his subjects. Over time, however, that distance began to feel inadequate. “I started doing this work when I wasn’t really comfortable doing it," he says. “I wanted to hide myself a little bit. That’s also why I started shooting with a long lens. But after one or two years, it felt a bit dishonest.” Instead, he found himself moving closer. “I felt like I had to be in the middle of my subjects so they can see what I’m doing," he explains. "They can ask what I’m doing. They are easy to approach.”

If the boys move through the book as a pack, the photographer occupies a more uncertain position: neither fully inside nor entirely outside it. Deleuze and Guattari describe belonging as a difficult state to maintain, one that requires constant adjustment to remain attached to the group without disappearing into it. Vandenbrink’s practice appears to have evolved towards exactly that threshold. No longer content to observe from afar, he places himself close enough to be seen, questioned and approached, without surrendering to either detachment or the illusion of belonging. 

WOLVES by Winter Vandenbrink is published by IDEA in a first edition of 750 copies.