Stephan Vanfleteren


Stephan Vanfleteren is a Belgian photographer, best known for his portraits in black and white and his depictions of Belgium and abroad.

Biography

Stephan Vanfleteren was born in Kortrijk in 1969, and was brought up in Oostduinkerke. He studied photography at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels from 1988 to 1992.
In 1993, while awaiting military service, he made a trip to New York, where he mostly did street photography. He has described New York as his "entrance ticket" to the profession of photography.

Career

Vanfleteren started out as primarily a photojournalist for the newspaper De Morgen. In this role, he covered, in black and white, stories of the 1990s such as the death of King Baudouin, the protests over the, the Kosovo War, the Rwandan genocide, and the Dutroux affair. He also found time for stories far from the headlines, such as the experience of riding boxcars in the American northwest.
He has also contributed to The Guardian, Humo, Independent Magazine, ''Knack, Le Monde, Paris Match, de Volkskrant, and Die Zeit.''
Co-founder of the publishing company Uitgeverij Kannibaal/Hannibal, he is also its artistic director. Since 2010, he has been a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.

''Elvis&Presley''

In May 1999, Vanfleteren travelled around the USA with his friend the Swiss photographer, in the footsteps of their idol Elvis Presley. They photographed each other, "in identical white jumpsuits, mirror shades and high-rise hair", as "Elvis" and "Presley", in humdrum scenes from Times Square to Death Valley. Vanfleteren photographed in black and white, Huber in colour. This led to [|Vanfleteren's first major book] and [|an exhibition]. Both photographers, said a reviewer of the exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery, showed themselves to "have a fine eye for ironic composition".

From reportage to portraiture

Vanfleteren's portraits have been his best-known and most recognizable work. Always in black and white, he has photographed many people from the art world but also many who are unknown. A review in Het Nieuwsblad of an exhibition of his portraits commented that Vanfleteren's proximity to the faces and the detail of the photographs together almost create "death masks of the living".
As an international project, Vanfleteren has given faces to numerous people living in poverty and isolation in Antwerp and Brussels. "While I focused on their eyes, I listened to their experiences." In 2009 these portraits, along with others, became the subject of an exhibition at Le Botanique, a cultural centre in Brussels. Most were taken with one of Vanfleteren's four Rolleiflexes, as their waist-level finders allowed him to get close.
In the same year, at, Ghent, Vanfleteren exhibited Portret 1989–2009, around two hundred portraits in black and white of people who had had some media presence during the previous two decades. [|The exhibition] then went on tour.
In 2018, he published Surf Tribe, for which he had made a months-long journey around the world, making portraits of surfers. He went to the most celebrated beaches for surfing, but also little-known places in order to portray the most famous surfers, champions as well as unknown amateurs. He did not photograph them in motion but instead captured their static portraits on the beach.

''Belgicum''

From September 2007 to February 2008, the exhibition Belgicum was held at Fotomuseum Antwerp. A review in La Libre described this:
Dilapidated buildings, outdated town fairs, unfashionable bars . Series of portraits – one could call them mugs – of persons bearing the scars of their hard lives, landscapes engulfed in mist, a document of the repetitive days of an internee at the Guislain Institute in Ghent and finally an un-embellished portrayal of Theofiel, an old farmer broken down amid a pile of objects. This is all "Belgicum"; and obviously, as the also shows, this tragic Belgium of the little people between canals and side-roads is in fact that of a true Simenon of photography.

Charleroi

Vanfleteren was the fifth in a series of photographers to be provided with a residency at the in Charleroi. He produced a series of photographs, including many portraits, taken in that city, which had been greatly affected by deindustrialization. These were exhibited in the museum in 2015. The exhibition was described on RTBF as "a tender look at a harsh reality", and as having links to the work of August Sander and Walker Evans yet being the product of a singular vision. A review in Moustique said:
Alone, free as a dog, sidling between fog and neon lights, in streets where memories of once flourishing industry disintegrate, or contemplating from the top of a slag heap a landscape where factories once spewed smoke, it is above all all the decay of the world that he encounters.

''Façades & Vitrines''

With rare exceptions, Vanfleteren has only photographed in black and white. However, in 2013 he published a series of colour photographs, taken several years earlier, of old wall advertisements, facades destined for demolition or abandoned shop windows; these appeared in a lavishly produced book, Façades & Vitrines.

''Stil leven''

In 2016, Vanfleteren made a series of photographs for an exhibition, Stil leven, at the , in Bunnik. Rejecting the museum's initial request for photographs of the Atlantic Wall, he let himself be influenced by the environment of the museum and the surrounding park to realize a series of nudes, still lifes with dead animals, in both black and white and colour. His photos form a dialogue with the work of the painter Armando, the building, and the surrounding nature.

''Present''

In 2020, Fotomuseum Antwerp organized a major retrospective, Present, which followed Vanfleteren's thirty years of photography, with personal reflections: from street photography in cities such as New York to the Rwandan genocide, from store facades to the "darkly beautiful" remains of the Atlantic Wall, from still lifes to portraits.

Awards

Solo and pair exhibitions

  • Elvis&Presley. Accompanied by [|a book].
  • *, Verona, 2001.
  • * Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, December 2001 – January 2002.
  • * Photographie am Schiffsbauerdamm, Berlin, 2002.
  • Belgicum. Accompanied by a book.
  • * FotoMuseum Provincie Antwerpen. September 2007 – January 2008.
  • * Flanders Center, Osaka. February–March 2008.
  • * Le Botanique, Brussels. June–August 2009.
  • * Galerie Hilaneh von Kories, Hamburg. November 2011 – March 2012.
  • * ImageSingulières, Sète, France. May–June 2012.
  • * Galerie Hilaneh von Kories, Hamburg. January–April 2015.
  • Portret 1989–2009. Accompanied by a book.
  • *, Ghent, September–December 2009.
  • *, Maastricht, April–June 2010. Accessed 5 August 2020.
  • *, Genk, Belgium, December 2010 – February 2011.
  • Flandrien. Accompanied by a book.
  • * Flandrien: Hard Men and Heroes. Host Gallery, London. June–July 2007.
  • * Flandrien., Amsterdam. April 2010.
  • * WielerSportCultuur. Netherlands Photo Museum, Rotterdam. June–August 2010.
  • * WielerSportCultuur. KU Leuven library. September–October 2010.
  • * Flanders Center, Osaka. March 2013.
  • * Flanders Center, Osaka. June 2013.
  • Flakkelân. Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands, June–August 2010.
  • Photography #1. De Tijd Hervonden, Hasselt, Belgium, February–April 2011. Successively: portraits, from Belgicum, and from Elvis&Presley.
  • En avant, marche, Huis van Alijn, Ghent, November 2012 – September 2013. Accompanied by a book.
  • Façades & Vitrines. Accompanied by a book.
  • * Broel Museum at, Kortrijk. March–June 2013. One of three shows constituting Aller Retour.
  • * Galerie Hilaneh von Kories, Hamburg. March–June 2014.
  • Stil Leven: Stephan Vanfleteren & Armando, , Bunnik, Netherlands, March–September 2016. An exhibition by Vanfleteren and Armando.
  • MMXIV: Les Diables / De Duivels. About the "Red Devils", Belgium's soccer team. Accompanied by a book.
  • * Botanique, Brussels. June–August 2014.
  • * C-Mine, Genk, Belgium. June–August 2015.
  • Atlantic Wall. Photographs of the "Atlantic Wall". Atlantic Wall Museum, Raversyde, Belgium. June–October 2014. Accompanied by a book.
  • Charleroi. Photographs of Charleroi. Musée de la photographie de Charleroi, Belgium. May–December 2015. Accompanied by a book.
  • Engelen van de Zee = The angels of the sea. Portraits of pupils of the maritime school Koninklijk Werk IBIS, Bredene.
  • * , Oostduinkerke, Belgium, July–November 2016.
  • * Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, September 2020 – April 2021.
  • Photographs of the and the student society. Utrecht University, May–July 2016. Accompanied by a book.
  • The People of Mercy. Maritiem Park, Antwerp, October–November 2017.
  • Surf Tribe. Accompanied by a book.
  • *, Knokke-Heist, Belgium. March–May 2018. Accompanied by a book.
  • * Kunsthal, Rotterdam, Netherlands. October 2018 – January 2019.
  • * Kahmann Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands. January–March 2019.
  • * Liberté! Bordeaux 2019, L'esprit des Lumières, Cour Mably and Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France. July–September 2019.
  • Terre / Mer. Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, July–November 2018. Photographs of Walcheren, commissioned by the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and presented as a supplement to an exhibition of paintings of Walcheren by Jan Toorop, Piet Mondriaan, Jacoba van Heemskerck and Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig.
  • Onuitgesproken: Michel Van Dousselaere., Ghent. December 2019 – March 2020. Accompanied by a book.
  • Present. FoMu Antwerp. October 2019 – September 2020. Accompanied by a book.
  • Corona walks. FoMu Antwerp. June–September 2020. Accompanied by a book.