Belgian photographer, born in 1947, Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt left us in 2015.
If one of his pretexts of predilection was the dogs (to which he devoted a book), it would be perfectly unjust to reduce it to this set both amused and sorry, in which he questions in a disturbing way the relations between the animal and its master.
Coming from a tradition of reporting that led him to collaborate widely with the press, he had begun his personal work with ensembles devoted to the "Belgian Competitions" and to immigrants in his country. From the very beginning, in the rectangle of his Leica, he builds pure, elegant photographs, marked by a constant humour that allows him to adopt a fair and amused distance to what unfolds before his eyes. With a very sure sense of space and distance from the subject, in compositions drawn with a string, he knows how to transform often mysterious photographs of moments of reality without ever being anecdotal.
If it often provokes a smile, it quickly raises, behind this first reaction, a series of questions, on the nature of what it shows us (its use of reflections is really troubling) and on the meaning - or lack of meaning - of the attitudes or situations it points to.
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Le Bec en l'air / Museum of Photography of Charleroi, 2022 Photographs : Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt Text: Mary van Eupen, Michel Poivert and Xavier Canonne 23.5 × 30 cm - 344 pages - 270 black and white photographs Cover: hardback, semi-covered French Isbn : 978-2-36744-165-8
Textes de Francine DEROUDILLE Actes Sud (2007) 12,5 x 19 cm 144 pages ISBN-13: 978-2-7427-6666-6