Max Pinckers

June 19 -23, 2003

About the workshop

SPECULATIVE DOCUMENTARY

How can photography convincingly engage with the world while at the same time recognize its own shortcomings and blind spots? How can we be inspired by the paradox of attempting to approach reality with a documentary attitude while it continuously mutates and evaporates? With photojournalism and documentary photography becoming increasingly formulaic, how can we rethink the documentary attitude conceptually, formally and methodologically?

This workshop will explore how self-reflexivity, uncertainty, imagination and speculation are an inherent part of documentary making, however contradictory that may sound.

During this five-day course in this unique and diverse Aegean island, we will delve into documentary theory, discuss contemporary practitioners and experiment with a number of playful exercises that test the limitations and expand the boundaries of documentary photography. You are encouraged to bring along an appetite for discussion and existing work or ideas for future projects that you’d like to think through.

About the artist

Max Pinckers ( ̊Brussels, 1988) grew up in Indonesia, India, Australia and Singapore. In 2007 he returned to his native country Belgium to study photography at the School of Arts/KASK in Ghent, where he attained a BA, MA and PhD in the arts. His work explores the critical, technological, and ideological structures that surround the production and consumption of documentary images. For Pinckers, documentary photography is a speculative process that approaches reality and truth as plural, malleable notions open to articulation in different ways. His installations and books are exhibited internationally, having received the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, amongst others. Pinckers is co-founder of the independent publishing house Lyre Press and The School of Speculative Documentary. He is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp and Tristan Lund in London.

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