I’m happy and proud to announce that I have won the portrait category in the Nikon Press Photo Award with this picture!! It was taken in december in Louisiana, and will be part of a series I’m working on.
Lake Arthur - Louisiana
Award!
In prison
… they do cycling competitions. Now here’s the difference: no faces on the pictures, and, of course, they cannot go outside to test their skills in the real ‘Ronde Van Vlaanderen’ (a very important cycling event in Belgium), but remain safely locked up in this very room. However, these prisoners ride the same amount of kilometers as the real pros do, and they can follow their progress on a screen. They compete against other inmates, and the guards.
Prison of Ghent, Belgium
The dog fair.
The same day that I went to the weapons fair (see my previous post), I went to the dog fair for a quick look, in the hall right next to it. Funny how these two worlds and their moods were only separated by a wall. I wanted to stay longer, but I had another assignment and couldn’t stay long. Here are a few pictures.
the weapons fair
Unusable guns, that’s what people came to find at that fair, in an expo hall in Gent, Belgium. Or old German WWII helmets, fake nazi badges and stamps. Some of them were real (so they say), but more expensive. Why would someone buy a copied and thus fake badge of a nazi officer? Or a gun that you can’t shoot, but that will cost you 150,- euro. Or an anti-tank rocket, emptied of all explosives. Also 150,- euro. Well, it seemed to attract some collectors. But, in the end, I found the master of evil checking weapons.
Brussels Philharmonic
Searching for coke
Now here’s a title that will attract some viewers… I got the chance of riding along with the Antwerp Harbor customs Rummage Team for a day, in their war against drug traffickers. That very harbor is notorious for the amount of cocaine that gets smuggled through it. None of the officers could be recognizably photographed (for obvious reasons), that is why there aren’t many faces in the photos. That’s a challenge.
There’s always the possibility of “blurring” faces afterwards, but I dislike that profoundly. I find it is actually destroying what might be a good photograph, and what’s left is a only crippled image that just doesn’t work. If you manage, however, to make a few good photographs without showing the faces, the results are much much better. But it’s still not the same, and it makes me realize how important it is to have the choice of showing faces or not. An expression or a gaze can add a lot of emotion in a photo. However, I’ve seen photographers make excellent work using no faces at all. Here is one for example. Still, it doesn’t work for every subject.
Here’s the selection I made for the newspaper that gave me this assignment. The whole article, written by Erik Raspoet, can be found in today’s edition of De Morgen newspaper.
Jozef De Witte
I made this picture last week, for an interview in De Morgen. Very friendly man.
Bread for da ducks.
Just a picture.
Mechelen, Belgium
Footballgirls
When you go on assignment – even a short one that happens close to home – and you’ve driven back thinking it went okay, it’s always a huge disappointment when you open up the newspaper later and see 1 ridiculously small, wee, tiny picture of yours published. Not even larger than two bloody columns. Thank you very much.
I guess all photographers know this annoying sense of frustration you get at the breakfast table, just when you’re starting up your day…
And that is exactly one of the reasons i’m trying to keep a blog. So that the pictures I’ve made don’t die a silent death on one of my hard drives, and, eventually, in my own memory.
So, with these few pictures, I show a training session of girls playing football, in freezing weather. This took me about an hour and a half to make. After that, their training was over and they went home, accomagnied by their parents. It is by no means a big story, for that I should have attended many training sessions and games. Just a small newspaper reportage – nothing more, nothing less either.
Angels & angelz
A bunch of Hell’s angels gathered at the Kortrijk Hall of Justice today to support their convicted mates. I didn’t get my ass kicked but the bloke in the nice fur hoodie gave me a huge finger after this shot so I kept lo-pro. The cops on the left weren’t too impressed. Later I heard from a fellow photographer that, a few hours later, they had attacked another photographer and hit his equipment.
