Present gathers several decades of Stephan Vanfleteren’s photography into a broad retrospective extending well beyond the probing black-and-white portraiture for which he is widely known. Street photographs made in cities such as New York sit within a practice that has also addressed the genocide in Rwanda, the architecture of façades and shop windows, the Atlantic Wall, still life, landscape, and portraiture. The result is not a narrowly defined project but an account of a photographer moving between documentary encounter, artistic study, and personal observation.
Vanfleteren selected several hundred photographs from his archive, bringing established images into relation with work that had not previously been published. His position is encapsulated by the idea of being both witness and accomplice: close enough to events and subjects to acknowledge involvement, yet attentive to photography’s documentary responsibilities. That tension gives the book its conceptual center. Presence here concerns not simply where the photographer stood, but how looking, proximity, and memory shape the record he makes.
Substantial texts by Vanfleteren accompany the photographs. Rather than treating the archive as self-explanatory, he considers changes in his own practice alongside the development of photography over recent decades, connecting both to wider social transformations. Present was conceived in association with the large retrospective held at FOMU, Antwerp’s photography museum, from October 2019 to March 2020; the publication therefore functions both as an independent monograph and as a durable counterpart to that institutional survey.
Published by Hannibal Publishers in 2020, the 496-page hardcover is significant for collectors because of its unusually extensive view of a single evolving practice. Its value lies in the conjunction of range and reflection: familiar bodies of work are not isolated as separate achievements, but reconsidered within a longer continuum that includes reportage, typology, landscape, and portraiture. For readers interested in how an archive can be edited into an artistic self-assessment—and how documentary photography negotiates history, empathy, and authorship—Present offers a particularly substantial case study.
