Stephan Vanfleteren (born 1969) is a Belgian photographer, best known for his portraits in black and white and his depictions of Belgium and abroad.
Biography
Stephan Vanfleteren was born in Kortrijk in 1969, and was brought up in Oostduinkerke. He studied photography at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels from 1988 to 1992.
In 1993, while awaiting military service, he made a trip to New York, where he mostly did street photography. He has described New York as his "entrance ticket" to the profession of photography.
Career
Vanfleteren started out as primarily a photojournalist for the newspaper De Morgen. In this role, he covered, in black and white, stories of the 1990s such as the death of King Baudouin, the protests over the , the Kosovo War, the Rwandan genocide, and the Dutroux affair. He also found time for stories far from the headlines, such as the experience of riding boxcars in the American northwest.
He has also contributed to The Guardian, Humo, Independent Magazine, Knack, Le Monde, Paris Match, de Volkskrant, and Die Zeit.
Co-founder of the publishing company Uitgeverij Kannibaal/Hannibal, he is also its artistic director. Since 2010, he has been a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.
Elvis&Presley
In May 1999, Vanfleteren travelled around the USA with his friend the Swiss photographer , in the footsteps of their idol Elvis Presley. They photographed each other, "in identical white jumpsuits, mirror shades and high-rise hair", as "Elvis" (Huber) and "Presley" (Vanfleteren), in humdrum scenes from Times Square to Death Valley. Vanfleteren photographed in black and white, Huber in colour. This led to Vanfleteren's first major book and an exhibition. Both photographers, said a reviewer of the exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery, showed themselves to "have a fine eye for ironic composition".
From reportage to portraiture
Vanfleteren's portraits have been his best-known and most recognizable work. Always in black and white, he has photographed many people from the art world but also many who are unknown. A review in Het Nieuwsblad of an exhibition of his portraits commented that Vanfleteren's proximity to the faces and the detail of the photographs together almost create "death masks of the living".
As an international project, Vanfleteren has given faces to numerous people living in poverty and isolation in Antwerp and Brussels. "While I focused on their eyes, I listened to their experiences." In 2009 these portraits, along with others, became the subject of an exhibition at Le Botanique, a cultural centre in Brussels. Most were taken with one of Vanfleteren's four Rolleiflexes, as their waist-level finders allowed him to get close.
In the same year, at , Ghent, Vanfleteren exhibited Portret 1989–2009, around two hundred portraits in black and white of people who had had some media presence during the previous two decades. The exhibition then went on tour.
In 2018, he published Surf Tribe, for which he had made a months-long journey around the world, making portraits of surfers. He went to the most celebrated beaches for surfing, but also little-known places in order to portray the most famous surfers, champions as well as unknown amateurs. He did not photograph them in motion but instead captured their static portraits on the beach.
Belgicum
From September 2007 to February 2008, the exhibition Belgicum was held at Fotomuseum Antwerp (FoMu). A review in La Libre described this: