The Green Room
International Photo Festival, Knokke-Heist, 2011.
Based on sixty portfolios that were submitted The Green Room presents a selection of recent work by photography students from four Belgian academies: Katholieke Hogeschool Limburg, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Ghent, Hogeschool Sint-Lukas, Brussels and La Cambre, Brussels. The Green Room showcases the pictures of this upcoming talent in two ways: in the form of an alternative publication and by means of a unique presentation in the Scharpoord Cultural Centre.
The title refers to the ‘green years’, the years during which students are ready to start experimenting and lay the foundations for their later work. The portfolios that were submitted clearly demonstrate how this young and hungry talent moulds and analyses the medium with a fresh and creative compound eye with rather hybrid results. We also highlight this heterogeneity by using a composite picture as a symbol for this project, which is made up of all the photos in the show.
The presentation offers a small sampling of the work of these new photographers. It translates the vision of today’s twenty-somethings and how they look at the world through their cameras and more importantly, how they position themselves in it.
If there is a common theme between their work, then it has to be the revelation of photography as an artificial viewing construction, a theme that frequently crops up in their work. Many students consciously test the boundary between fiction and reality to this end: they see the world as a giant theatre which they can stage, manipulate, criticize and unravel. Many of them consider taking pictures like a play with actors, sets, scenarios and props and stage directions. In this era of ubiquitous visual commerce and virtual 3-D worlds, reality in the eyes of these young people increasingly degenerates to a subjective and plastic photoshopped image. Photography is no longer a means of documenting one’s surroundings; instead it allows the photographer to get a grip on it.
While some students focus on sending up the conventional photo genres (the playful ‘fashion photos’ of Annelie Vandendael, the faked forensic photographs of Steven Callens), others simulate artfully staged, imaginary worlds (Athos Burez) or digitally sanitized ‘ideal portraits’ (Romain Menke). Whereas one student focuses on creating a series of alter egos (Elsa Parra’s self-portraits), the other appropriates images from mass media to assemble an evocative story (Jolien Dirickx).
Some photographers take photos of mundane aspects portraying them in such a way that they are stripped of their familiarity. Banality is thus transformed into an enigmatic and poetic universe (Arnold Lebovics, Maxime De Cock), or reveals an intimate, mental space (Debbie Thijs, Céline Gladiné, Kelly De Block). Gender issues (Max Pinckers & Quinten De Bruyn, Valerie Vonck), the sideways glance from the world of pathology (Sanne De Wilde), the visualization of a youth culture (Laetitia Jeurissen, Zaza Bertrand); each of these sequences analyses a specific sub-group, highlighting the margins of traditional viewing and living.
The spatial framework is also often presented as a setting: in views of sterile, dreamlike interiors (Jens Verheyden, Dieter Van Caneghem, Zoé Van der Haegen), artificial museum exhibits (Claire Fau), landscapes that bear the scars of the past (Dieter Daemen), empty cityscapes which are slowly fading (Tim Van den Oudenhoven), images of the boundary between personal and public space (Virginie Elbert) or stripped spaces which reveal traces of temporary activity (Jeroen Lambertyn). They emphasize the unreal vacuum of our surroundings and create a sense of alienation.
Political, territorial and social margins are examined in The Green Room (a portrait of Albania as an economic ruin by Frederick Buyckx, the emotional family chronicle of An-Sofie Kesteleyn), but also reflexive practices which examine the aesthetic boundaries of the medium itself (Virginie Gouband). The ultimate cut-off between the temporary and permanent aspects of photography, between life and death, is also incorporated in the exhibition in the form of a post-mortem (animal) portrait (Nele Froyen).
The images featured in The Green Room function as mental spaces in which things are taken out of their context to play a role in the creation of a personal and collage-like environment. The parameters and conventions of the medium itself are explicitly used to reflect the act of looking. These photographers thus assemble an up-to-date look at today’s world: alienating and yet in such close proximity to their subject.
