BY DIETER DEBRUYNE
1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?
I started taking pictures when I was a teenager, my first camera was a Nikon FM2 with a 50mm lens. I was shooting friends and my life in general, which is something I don’t do much anymore. But when I do, I still use this exact same camera.
2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?
When I was studying photography I was very interested in architecture and its relationship to landscape in general. So after my studies I started working for architects, taking pictures of their projects which is now my full time job. Besides taking those pictures which represent their projects for commercial and communication purposes, I like to collaborate with architects on projects that involve photography by using it as a tool to express architectural and urban concepts. In my personal work, I’m always using the prism of architecture to talk about subjects that fascinates me. I like that landscape photography reveals real situations. It has a fantastic power to express a personal vision through the distance created between the subject and the photographer and the limits imposed by framing.
3. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?
I think it gives a larger panel for people to express themselves with the right tool. The ability to take a lot of pictures in digital is fantastic, the same way using a 4x5 analog camera is, but for other purposes. Being able to take pictures with your phone and sending it to people on the spot is something that I do believe is really great. People just have to know the limits of the way they’re using these specific tools, whatever they are.
© Maxime Delvaux, World map mosaic in International Children’s Union Camp. The North Korean maps are always represented unified to symbolize the will of reunification. From the series ‘DPRK 2012’
4. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?
My favorite camera is my 4x5. Working with 4x5 films for landscape pictures gives the best results in terms of images, as the softness of the film is incomparable. But what I find most interesting in working with a large format is all the contraints that this process involves. Working with contraints forces you to think more about how to create your work in general. Working with a 4x5 is difficult : it is heavy, you need a tripod, you cannot catch a moment, the films are expensive, etc. All these things help me focus on how and why each picture should be taken. It also creates some kind of distance between the subject and myself. But as I said before, I think every type of picture should be taken in a specific way, requiring a specific tool for a specific purpose.
5. Tell us about your latest project ‘Interiors, Notes and Figures’
The most recent important project I’ve worked on is ‘Interiors, Notes and Figures’. It is the project for the Belgian pavilion at the 2014 Architecture Venice Biennale. We worked for a year with architects, an art curator and a sociologist. The idea of the project was to make a study about how the architecture has been transformed, adjusted, modified through time, behind the permanence of buildings’ facades. The study that is presented in the book and in the pavilion attempts to define a vocabulary and to reveal the attitudes that, beyond pure form, allow us to define a culture that is specific to these transformations.
For this project I travelled for 5 months around Belgium, photographing more than 500 domestic interiors following the same photographic process : taking only frontal images. This process allowed the images to be compared for the purpose of the study and were to be taken with the same approach on various locations. This was important as it allowed the viewer not only to focus on the social status or the decoration of these interiors, but to be able to create a story by associating the images with each other.
© Maxime Delvaux from the series ‘Interiors, Notes and Figures’
6. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and
emerging, who influenced you in some way?
During my studies the discovery of the new topographics and Dusseldorf’s school approach radically changed my vision of photography. That must but the main influence on my work.
7. Three books of photography that you recommend?
I’m not really into photography books, but I’ll suggest the general works of Bas Princen, Noemie Goudal and Mark Power.
© Maxime Delvaux still of the book ‘Interiors, Notes and Figures’
8. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
Laurent Grasso, Double soleil, Perrotin Gallery Paris 2014
Pierre Huygues / Centre Pompidou Paris 2013
These are the two most powerful and consistent shows I’ve seen lately.
9. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
I just finished a workshop with the students of master at LaCambre Architecture School in Brussels, during which we tried to develop a new kind of scale model photography. I am now working on a project to present in an exhibition that will be displayed in the « Château de Seneffe’s garden », with nine other belgian photographers.
10 Tell me something about your adventure in North - Korea…. How did things go there? Did you have a watchdog?
I spent ten days in North Korea. To get there, you have to enter the country through a travel agency that organizes tours with the local authorities. I was there with a company based in Beijing. I spent 3 days with a tour group visiting Pyongyang and the South Korean border. Then I spent 7 more days alone visiting 4 other cities. The tours are very organized, I always had two guides by my side and a driver. Every day I’d visit various sites with my guides that always depicted the grandeur of the regime like museums, factories, public buildings, cooperative farms and of course, monuments. Everything was prepared for my venue and the very few people I met told me how great the country was. When the visits are over, they’d bring me back to the hotel and they’d give me way too much food to eat. As a tourist you can never leave the hotel, walk alone in the streets or ask to stop somewhere as you pass by. I guess it’s a bit like the visits in former USSR. Your guides are trained to entertain you and most of the people that come here to visit, end up leaving the country with a better opinion than the one they had when they arrived. The propaganda system really works well even for foreigners that are aware of the regime’s atrocities. That’s exactly the point of my work, trying to make people realize what it means for a country to be displaying all of this. The explanations linked to the images are the ones provided by the regime and help the viewer understand the scale of the folly.
© Maxime Delvaux, Monument to the Party Foundation. This monument was constructed in Pyongyang under Kim Jong Il’s will to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Korean Workers Party. From the series ‘DPRK 2012’
11. You’re talking about the BECHERS. I see a lot of influences in the Hong Kong series… Why did you go there and why did you use this kind of photography; I see a lot of Gursky -like pictures.
I was transiting in Honk Kong and I decided to spend a few days there to visit the city. At that moment, I received a proposal for a competition about «Utopian architecture and sustainability». I decided to answer the question by presenting a pragmatic vision of sustainable cities that was based on the concept of the vertical city. It was a good pretext to walk around the city and photograph Hong Kong’s urban density. It has some kind of a Gursky point of view in the sense that in some of the pictures the scale of what you see is not always very clear. That’s something I’m very interested in and that I really like in Gursky’s work.
© Maxime Delvaux, ‘Hong Kong’
12. How did you get in the Venice Biennale?
There is a competition for the Belgian pavilion every four years organized by the Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles. I was contacted by the architect Bernard Dubois to join a team consisting of architects Sarah Levy, Sebastien Martinez Barat and art curator Judith Wielander. We won the competition with our project «Interiors, Notes and figures», and presented a year later in the Belgian pavilion in Venice.
© Maxime Delvaux, ‘Interiors, Notes and Figures’ at Belgian Pavillon Venice Biennal
I also collaborated to the Korean Pavilion this year. We had meetings in Venice with the general curator Rem Koolhaas and the curators of the other participating countries. I heard that the team of South Korea had a project to make an exhibition about the architecture of North and South Korea. I told them that beside the work I did about the power of North Korea’s propaganda, I also documented as much North Korean architecture as I could.That’s how I collaborated with the Korean curator Minsuk Cho on their national pavilion.