Being There

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.