Still Stories

Subtitles. As a kid I felt lucky to live in Belgium where we subtitled movies instead of killing the actors by dubbing them like in France or Germany or Italy. Now, since Netflix (and a Korean Oscar), the whole world is reading subtitles. In movies, but just as well in things like memes, the bastard children of tabloid headlines. I'm a photographer, writer and scriptwriter. In this body of work, the writer and photographer in me have found one another. I shoot scenes in reality that look as if they could have been staged and I add a subtitle. So imagine you enter a room where somebody has paused a movie. You see a still of a story you don't know, with an actor you don't know in a situation of which you can only guess the outlines. Who's speaking? Or thinking? The guy in the shot or the girl we don't see? We've all seen enough movies and Netflix to let our imagination come up with some answer. But, of course, my subtitle is undeniably... framing the picture in some way. On my website you will see a film of a major exhibition I had in Bruges Belgium. Half of the exhibition were Still Stories like these. They are my most personal artistic photo work till today. I'm also working on a pure Vietnamese Still Stories series for an exhibition in gallery Noirfoto.com in Saigon in September 2020.