Bieke Depoorter

Bieke Depoorter earned a master’s degree in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent in 2009. Three years later, at 25 years old, she was made a nominee of the photo cooperative Magnum Photos, where she was named a full member in 2016.

Depoorter has won several awards and honors, including the Magnum Expression Award, The Larry Sultan award and the Prix Levallois. Last year, she got nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize with her solo Exhibition A Chance Encounter At C/O Berlin.

She exhibits internationally and has published six books: Ou Menya, I am About to Call it a Day, As it May Be, Sète#15 and X. This last book was recognized as one of MoMA’s favorite photobooks of 2021. Blinked Myself Awake is published in November 2024.

The relationships Depoorter forms with the subjects of her photographs lie at the foundation of her artistic practice. Accidental encounters are often the starting point, and how these interactions naturally develop dictates the suite. Many of her works stem from an ongoing questioning of the photographic medium itself.

In her latest book, Blinked Myself Awake, she is shifting her gaze inward. In recent years, photographer Bieke Depoorter has sought out amateur stargazers, visited state-of-the-art observatories, and researched the history of astronomy. Never especially interested in the field earlier, she gradually realized that her new obsession was related to childhood memories lost due to trauma. The night sky is, after all, a kind of shared memory: the light from celestial bodies can take hundreds or thousands of light-years to reach our eyes on earth.

She connects the dots of a highly personal narrative, interweaving images of stargazers with diaristic texts and fragments from the history of astronomy.

In As it may be, Depoorter gradually became more aware of her status as an outsider, both culturally and as a photographer. So, in 2017, she revisited Egypt with the first draft of the book, inviting people to write comments directly onto the photographs.

In Sète#15, and also Dvalemodus, a short film she co-directed, she began to see her subjects as actors. Although she portrayed them in their true environments, she tried to project her own story onto the scenes, fictionalizing the realities of her subjects in a way that blurred the lines between their world and hers.

In the self-published book X., Bieke Depoorter explores the complexities of the photographic enterprise, grappling with the relationship between photographer and subject. By diving deep into a collaborative working dynamic with a woman that she met in a club, she creates a small alternate universe that served as a container for them to explore questions they each had regarding identity, performance and representation.

It is a project that asks more questions than it offers answers, first recognizing the well-worn idea of photographer-as-witness as a relative impossibility, then throwing all players involved under the microscope: photographer, subject, audience, and, of course, the medium itself.