Oe Menia — Bieke Depoorter

A beau­ti­ful idea, beau­ti­fully rendered.

Oe Menia by Bieke Depoorter recently won the Mag­nun Expres­sion Award. I am encour­aged that this series beat out a strong show­ing of pre­dict­ably out­stand­ing , typ­ic­ally hard-core, but oth­er­wise bor­ing “photojournalism”.

Those other stor­ies included a bunch of poor people in a vari­ety of loc­ales, all look­ing poor. There are pic­tures about drug addicts, abused miners, and sur­viv­ors of war. There are pic­tures made at great risk, and pic­tures made in incred­ible places. The also-ran pho­to­graph­ers are all supremely tal­en­ted in their own right, but their work falls short for the same reason: it is impersonal.

Depoorter’s approach was dif­fer­ent too:

“I am look­ing for a place to spend the night. Do you know people who would have a bed, or a couch? I don’t need any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, and I have a sleeping-bag. I prefer not to stay in a hotel, because I don’t have a lot of money and because I want to see the way people live in Rus­sia. Could I stay at your place, per­haps? Thank you very much for your help!”

What Bieke Depoorter has, and the oth­ers lack, is a fun­da­ment­ally social approach to pho­to­graphy. Her pho­tos are doc­u­ments of a social exper­i­ence first, and pho­to­graphs second. Yes they are beau­ti­ful, but their power is that they embody a rela­tion­ship. There is noth­ing spe­cial about the places Depoorter went to, but we will never be able to visit. Her pho­to­graphy is unique, a record of an event and a rela­tion­ship that is impossible to receate. Yes, her people are poor too, but the pho­tos aren’t cloy­ing or stero­typ­ical. They describe, with respect, a par­tic­u­lar human exper­ince in the spe­cific and the gen­eral.  They do not abstract and isol­ate, they con­nect. When I look at these pho­tos, I feel a fren­etic, agit­ated, almost crazed energy just below the sur­face. I can­not say the same for the others.

And as a sup­ple­ment­ary series, I find her pic­tures of sleep­ing places a per­fect counterballance.

Credit to my friend Saty for the heads up about this work.