(Un)expected began in 2008, when documentary photographer Peter Dekens lost his mother to suicide; years later, a close friend died the same way. That double loss is not the book’s only subject, but it governs its temperature. Dekens grew up in West Flanders, a region whose suicide rate is among the highest in Europe — one and a half times the European average, and twice that of the Netherlands — and the project emerged from his contact with people there who had survived the suicide of someone close. For some, the death arrived without warning; for others, the traumatic event had been feared or half-anticipated. The title holds both experiences at once.
The book follows five stories, each tracking grief as it is actually lived rather than as it is conventionally described. Hanne walks to the same woods for months to sit by the tree where Ime died. Dekens’s father continues to perform household tasks on autopilot after his wife’s death. José relives the same emotion on the train each time it passes the place where Steven ended his life. Kris fights depression after losing her son. The children of Walter absorb the loss of their mother. Sadness and mourning are present, but so are the improvisations by which people find a way to keep living.
The publisher, Eriskay Connection, issued the book in 2016 in a cahier binding with pages of differing sizes — a physical form that resists the uniformity of the standard photobook and one that Rob van Hoesel designed. Dekens wrote the text with the psychiatrist Dirk De Wachter; Christel Don edited it. The result asks to be read as well as looked at.
Dekens has said he hopes (Un)expected will be useful to caregivers, general practitioners, specialists, nurses, and students of psychology, psychiatry, and social work — and, above all, that it will support survivors and make the taboo surrounding suicide more widely discussable. For a collector, its significance lies here: in a work of documentary photography whose formal decisions and editorial collaborations are inseparable from its ethical purpose.
