The Documentary Factor (exhibition catalogue)

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Dirk Braeckman usually employs black-and-white photography. His pictures show people, interiors, details of architecture. In the combination of these visual elements in publications or installations, a narrative with photographic means that is full of atmosphere comes about. However, we do not know whether we are situated in the realm of the description of facts or of photographic fiction. Braeckman subjects his straightforward shots to multiple refractions. He often re-photographs already existing motifs – his own and those provided by the media – chooses details, changes the perspective or processes them digitally and photographs them from the monitor in order to achieve a refraction of the direct photographic image and in this way attain a subjectively charged perception of reality. In his dark, occasionally hardly readable works the documentary interest no longer stands in the foreground, but the deployment of all possible photographic methods of appropriation with the aim of creating suggestively charged, personal, and thus unmistakable photographs.

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