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In Transcripts of a Sea, Stephan Vanfleteren brings together photography shaped by his recent engagement with the ocean. The sea is not treated as an isolated motif: the project places contemporary photographs in conversation with the development of maritime painting and with artists who approached the subject between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Its scope is therefore both personal and art-historical, moving from one photographer’s sustained fascination toward a longer tradition of representing water, weather, distance, and the marine horizon.

The book was published by Hannibal Publishers in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, presented from 20 September 2025 to 4 January 2026. That museum setting supplies an important framework. Vanfleteren’s photographs invite viewers to reconsider historical marine imagery from a contemporary position, while the earlier paintings establish a lineage against which his own perspectives can be read.

The central method is comparative rather than simply thematic. Photography becomes a means of looking again at how the sea has been imagined across centuries: as a natural presence, a pictorial problem, and a subject capable of carrying changing cultural meanings. The project’s distinctiveness lies in this intersection of media and periods, connecting Vanfleteren’s encounter with the sea to an established history of maritime representation without collapsing their differences.

At 288 pages, Transcripts of a Sea gives this inquiry room to unfold beyond the limits of the exhibition encounter. For a serious photobook collection, its importance rests in the precision of its premise: it documents a defined museum project while also positioning contemporary photography within a much older visual history. The result merits attention as both a focused body of photographic work and a publication concerned with how images speak across time.