Vincen Beeckman

For Vincen Beeckman (born in 1973, lives and works in Brussels), collaboration is essential. The photographer avoids the one-way relationship between the photographer and their subject that defines so many photographic practices. Instead, he collaborates extensively with all kinds of people and gives visibility to places and communities that would otherwise go unrecognized. Take Les Cracks, a long-term project that Vincen Beeckman started in 2014 in Brussels, where he collaborated with a homeless community around the Brussels Central Station. The photographer provided the community with disposable cameras. Instead of trying to integrate them, he invited them to photograph themselves, resulting in an unmediated record of their lives. The images are candid: they testify to the exchanges between Vincen Beeckman and the community and the connections among the homeless themselves.

The photographer's work does not easily fit into a single photographic genre but rather constitutes a constellation of several. This may be because Vincen Beeckman is a multifaceted creator: an artist, curator, and educator. For example, between 2014 and 2020, he organized the "Extra Fort" evenings at Recyclart, collectively inviting hundreds of speakers to talk about photography during half a decade of themed evenings. He also created the Fusée de la Motographie, a traveling museum of Belgian photography composed of 100 wooden boxes, each representing a different practitioner.