Present

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