Gilbert Fastenaekens
Photographer
Born in Belgium in 1955, photographer Gilbert Fastenaekens has long been a proponent of the "documentary style", somewhere between the German and French landscape schools, halfway between the modest reproduction of reality and its artistic re-appropriation. Recognized early on for his Nuits (1980-1987), nocturnal urban landscapes that broke with the ubiquitous photo-reportage of the time, he took part in the Datar photographic mission on regional planning in France, and won the Kodak prize for photographic criticism in 1986.
Although a photographer who relies on a radical language, far removed from any kind of pictorialist effect, we sense here that Gilbert Fastenaekens is less interested in the places themselves than in the visual, even sensual, experience they provide. And, like a painter or sculptor, he transforms the subject into what we might call photographic emotion or sensation.
