Meet three young Belgian photographers casting their lens on the world

If you’re looking for one of the next generation of Belgian photographers, don’t look close to home. With a seemingly insatiable urge to travel, they’re more likely to be found in Iceland or Slovenia, Japan or India than in downtown Brussels.

For Maroesjka Lavigne, travel is about opening up to new ideas. “I love to discover new places, places that are totally new for me and full of surprises. I just walk or drive around and look at everything as if I was a character in a movie.”

Her first project abroad was inspired by an internship with a newspaper in Iceland. After a month on assignment she travelled through the country for a further three months, returning later to experience the winter. The resulting images explore the way people relate to Iceland’s stark, beautiful landscape, with a strong interplay of brightness, darkness and colour.

These photographs made up her graduation project in 2012 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent. They went on to win awards, and earned her a solo show at the Robert Mann Gallery in New York.

The commissions that followed inspired further trips. Asked to produce photographs on a feminist theme, she went to Seoul to explore cosmetic surgery in South Korea, resulting in the series You Are More Than Beautiful. Invited to Japan by the Flanders Centre in Osaka, she produced Not Seeing is a Flower, a series looking for the modern beauty of Japan, along with echoes of ‘floating world’ artists such as Hiroshige and Hokusai.

“Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the link between aesthetics and content,” she says. “The question of whether photography always has to go together with meaning, or if you can just let it go and be satisfied with a certain type of feeling. I respect photographers who have very aesthetic pictures but with a lot of hidden layers.”

Her latest trip has taken her to Namibia, in search of places relatively untouched by human hands. “I wanted to do something Iceland-like again. To wander around in a place that is still very natural, look around and be surprised,” she explains. “It was absolutely beautiful. One of the most impressive journeys I’ve made so far. I saw more animals than people.”

She finds this isolation inspiring rather than challenging. “People always ask me if I get lonely out there on my own. In the beginning it’s hard to leave home, but when I find an interesting location I forget about that quickly.”

Travel means something different for Max Pinckers, who grew up in Asia, spending his early years in Bali, Australia, India and Singapore. “When I came back to Belgium to study, aged 18, I felt more at home there than here,” he says. "When I had to choose what to do for my masters degree, I was drawn back to Asia because I still felt that I knew it better.”

He also studied at KASK, developing an approach that challenges accepted ideas about documentary photography. Sceptical about its ability to capture objective truth, he also rejects the pursuit of a ‘decisive moment’ in which chance conspires to create an aesthetically pleasing image.

“If there is a moment that you need to capture, it’s better to make sure that moment happens instead of waiting for it.”

He first applied these ideas in Thailand, working with classmate Quinten De Bruyn to produce carefully composed, artificially lit photographs of life in the transgender community. “You have these eerily perfect-looking images, which might seem spontaneous and real, but because of the artificial lighting the viewer gets the feeling that something isn’t right.”

For the book Lotus these images were combined with photographs taken by the subjects themselves, using disposable cameras. “These pictures say more about their world than anything we, as photographers, could ever achieve.”

Pinckers went to India for his graduation project, exploring the influence of Bollywood on everyday life by combining pictures taken on film sets with scenes improvised in the streets. “Once you set up your lights and your camera, within ten minutes there will be thirty people gathered around to watch what happens. Then all I have to do is turn around and say: Who wants to be the star? Immediately you get volunteers, and then people from the crowd start to direct what’s going on.”

After graduating in 2012 he returned to India, extending this idea with a series contrasting romantic depictions of ‘forbidden’ relationships with the harsh reality of living through them. He has also worked in Japan, playing with western preconceptions of the country, and in Kenya with veterans of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. This project contrasts their versions of events with British propaganda from the time.

He is also busy with a PhD examining conventions in documentary photography, and he was recently nominated to the prestigious Magnum Photos agency. “It came as quite a surprise,” he says. “I didn’t think my work would fit in some how.” Where this will lead remains to be seen, he adds.

Gert Verbelen is a third KASK student to have caught the travel bug, although with completely different destinations. His first photographic trip involved taking the train from Moscow to Beijing, a journey he expected to be about landscape. “I thought I’d spend all my time sitting at the window, but actually the opposite happened, and it was all happening inside the train.”

Stopping off in Russian and Mongolian villages along the way confirmed his interest in everyday people and places. “I think a photographer is always a kind of voyeur, always looking for something exotic, but the exotic can also mean banal things.”

For his 2014 graduation project he devised a different kind of journey: he would visit the 18 countries of the eurozone, spending a week in whatever settlement was closest to the centre. “It’s a way of going deep into a country, to see what’s there,” he explains.

He did no research beyond finding the location and fixing somewhere to stay. Once he arrived, he simply got up every morning and went out with his camera. “Often there was nothing to see,” he recalls. “In France, I had to walk around all day before I saw anyone.”

And yet the project obliged him to keep walking the same three or four streets. “It becomes like a performance. You think to yourself that you have seen everything already, but you haven’t. Every day is another day, every day there are different people and different light. Instead of travelling through the country, in search of something, you have to stick to that point, the same stones and the same doors that you see every day, just to intensify your gaze.”

Out of thousands of images, he selected just a few to represent each location in his book, The Inner Circle of Europe. Much of this was down to instinct, choosing colours and forms that produced a coherent sensation of each place. “I sensed that I had to make collages,” Verbelen says. “Each one had to be one country, but also give an oversight of Europe.”

The results are also personal. “The villages are like holding up a mirror to myself. As a photographer, what you photograph is also what you are.”

This article first appeared in ING Expat Time