Published by Lannoo Uitgeverij in 2007, Belgicum is Stephan Vanfleteren’s portrait of his native Belgium at the turn of the twenty-first century. Its field of attention is deliberately broad but close to the ground: the country appears through its people and the recurring phenomena of everyday life rather than through official emblems or a comprehensive geographic survey. The result is both personal and national in scope.

Across approximately 150 black-and-white photographs, Vanfleteren approaches Belgium as a lived environment. Ordinary subjects acquire weight through sustained observation, while individual faces and situations contribute to a larger account of place. The monochrome vocabulary gives disparate encounters a shared register, allowing the book to move between intimacy and social description without reducing the country to a single defining image.

The historical frame matters. Made around the end of one century and the beginning of another, these photographs preserve the appearance and atmosphere of Belgium during a period of transition. Their significance lies less in recording major public events than in attending to the details through which a society becomes visible: its inhabitants, routines, gestures, and vernacular settings. Belgicum therefore operates as a photographic document as well as an authored interpretation of home.

Described as Vanfleteren’s first monograph, the book occupies an important position within his bibliography. This 204-page hardcover is catalogued as the first edition, third printing. For a serious photobook collection, its interest rests on the concentration of an early monographic statement, the consistency of its black-and-white language, and the specificity of its social and historical subject. It offers a coherent example of how sustained attention to ordinary life can form a complex portrait of a country.