Dirk Braeckman

While Belgian photographer Dirk Braeckman’s pictures often feature subjects from his own surroundings, they also depict mysterious hidden worlds. In the images, we see sober interiors: shower stalls, lifts, hallways, curtains, mattresses and frosted-glass windows. Sometimes women appear in the frame, though they remain as anonymous as the rooms around them (see A.D.F.-V.N.1.-03). The atmosphere often resembles that of cheap hotels and seedy boarding houses. Nearly all the photographs are black and white.

Yet Braeckman is not interested in bleakness as a theme. His concern is the image itself, the picture as a direct registration of the space. As the artist explains: ‘Maybe I do want to make things you can’t quite figure out. You can see the picture: it’s not merely formal, but you can’t immediately call it anything else, either. At most, you can list what’s shown, but that’s not the point. It’s true that I want to go so far that there’s only that image.’

To that end, he rejects detached observation in favour of proximity and the registration of a fleeting moment in a picture, frozen in time. Yet his photographs are not the products of chance. They have been carefully staged with meticulous attention to composition, blurred areas and light. The quality of the print is crucial: it must be dark and deep grey, yet full of nuance. The artist sometimes intentionally leaves traces of the analogue development process visible.

In that darkness, texture and surface are rendered in unflinching detail as the hard glare of the flash bounces off Formica, tiles, plush fur or a woman’s hair (see AP7/C0-02). And while the photos are not intentionally narrative, they do suggest entire backstories. Braeckman’s work is always open-ended. Each piece is an unfinished story that extends past the moment the shutter clicks and continues on beyond the frame.