Corona Walks & PRESENT AT HOME

Belgium is currently in lock down. We can only go outside to get food and some people are allowed to go to their work. We can go outside for a walk and once a day around 6:30 pm, Stephan Vanfleteren leaves with his camera to the sea, forest, fields...

He named his walks: Corona walks.

Corona Walks
It is not doing so well with the world, or more correctly, it is not doing so well with humanity and its system.
While cities ghosting and economies bursting, nature does not behave much differently than usual.
Spring is budding. Last week I saw the first bumblebee, the day before yesterday a butterfly and today a purple dead nettle in the dunes. Clouds float on, birds chirp at each other, waves break and in the West the light disappears. Everything as always.

And yet you look better now. You can see that winter storms have changed the beach. That ebb flows back to the sea otherwise. You fantasize magnified viruses in the tops of the broken trees. You gaze at the holiday-apartment buildings at the beach and you don't think of tourists but of prisoners. An invisible virus makes you look differently. Temporary happiness in a great drama.

I go for a walk during the evening news. To the sea, dunes or forest, always at nightfall. Walks that are slower, longer and darker than before. No rush, no impatient messages are waiting in your mailbox. Longer on the road, normal life still stands still. The journey always ends in darkness, because the light does not wait for anyone.
Walking becomes strolling. Hang on, return on my steps, wait, watch, observe. And shooting from the wrist, which does not wear a watch.

Some clap their hands to support the healthcare sector, sing or make music from a balcony.
Others send poems by mail or hang a white blanket on the window. All equally meaningless, and yet so very useful.
The fellow man comforts and supports.
Walking in the evening country.
The evening does not fall alone.
We will get up together later.

Stephan Vanfleteren














PRESENT AT HOME
FOMU Antwerp - PRESENT is closed but they made 6 films for PRESENT AT HOME.
Now that we are currently unable to visit PRESENT (you were up to 125.000 visitors, thank you!), FOMU Antwerp came up with the idea to bring PRESENT to your seat, chair, bed, bath, at home ...PRESENT AT HOME.

Starting at the beginning: 1/early work.
'What were the fears and interests of young Stephan Vanfleteren? As a starting photographer, does he make choices that determine the rest of his further work?' FOMU-guide Karolien will guide you through my life and work. Every week we will post two episodes of the tour through the exhibition PRESENT.
Enjoy!

Stephan Vanfleteren was 24 years old when he left the offices of the belgian newspaper De Morgen - with shaking knees. As a young man he is sent to Rwanda during the horrors of the genocide. Today, Vanfleteren takes a critical look at this series. How can you depict such suffering without being sensationalised? Watch Episode 2.

Present' at home via FOMU & Stephan Vanfleteren Instagram, Facebook page, Vimeo and www.fomu.be.
The PRESENT book is still available at Hannibal Publishing or the FOMU webshop or at your favorite bookshop/webshop.

PRESENT BOOK
Stephan Vanfleteren (1969) is mainly known to the general public for his penetrating black & white portrait photography, but over the past decades his work has ranged to documentary, artistic and personal pictures. From street photography in world cities like New York to the genocide of Ruanda, from storefront façades to the mystical landscapes of the Atlantic wall, from still lifes to intense portraits. The iconic images sit side by side with unknown treasures in this heavy tome containing no less than 505 photographs.

In the very personal accompanying text, Vanfleteren reflects on how his own work and the photography genre as a whole have evolved in recent decades. You get a close-up look at his intriguing career from the very beginning, when he travelled the world with an appetite for action. He also photographed his home country: all of the headline news stories of the 1990s appeared before his lens. Around the Millennium, Vanfleteren started to focus on that which is disappearing. With painstaking attention to nuance he created a visual archive of his homeland and of his fellow Belgians, in his own inimitable style. In the last few years Vanfleteren has brought the world inside, to his daylight studio, resulting in many encounters and portraits. This book includes two new series - not previously published - which were born in the intimacy of his studio: an exploration of the still life and a study of nude photography, both in colour.

Stephan Vanfleteren turns fifty this year and he is celebrating with a major retrospective exhibition filling the entire building at Fotomuseum Antwerpen (FOMU, from 25 October 2019 to 1 March 2020) and with this publication.

I was there, I was present, says the photographer, who always feels as much a witness as an accomplice. Present is an impressive overview of Vanfleteren's oeuvre that provides a complete picture of him as a photographer, an artist, and above all a human being who faces life with empathy, wonder, and curiosity.

Find out more about his book PRESENT