Friday, June 2: 10:00 - 18:00
10:00 - 13:00: talk and group discussion
13:00 - 14:00: lunch break
14:00 - 18:00: assignment + feedback
This workshop will be held in English.
The mother tongue of the photographer is Dutch. When all participants indicate in the registration form that they speak Dutch, the language of the workshop will be changed to Dutch.
The tuition for this workshop is 95 euros.
If you would like an invoice, please send an email to festival@bspfestival.org.
Participants are invited to bring their own work, along with a sense of humor and appetite for discussion. Your work and/or assignment will be discussed individually with Max Pinckers.
Also take your favorite camera and flash equipment with you, most preferably a digital camera. Remember to bring enough batteries and an empty memory card with enough space to take pictures during the workshop.
Furthermore you will need a laptop with software to edit/tone your images and a notebook to take down notes during the workshop.
Marquis building
Sinter-Goedeleplein 5
1000 Brussels
Participants are expected to make their own travel and accommodation arrangements.
For more information about the city, please visit www.visit.brussels.
Ensure that you have the necessary travel documents and visas to attend the event. The BSPF can provide letters of support if needed.
Payments are non-refundable. Please contact us at festival@bspfestival.org for special cases.
Participants must register to confirm their spot. First come, first served. Fill in the form and pay below to secure your spot in time.
The BSPF is not responsible for reimbursing travel expenses if a workshop is cancelled. We recommend that you purchase refundable airline tickets and/or travel insurance.
The BSPF reserves the right to cancel groups of less than 6 students. Participants will either receive a full refund or be offered a spot with another photographer. In the event of cancellation due to insufficient enrollment, participants will be notified at least 5 days in advance.
If you have any further questions, please send an e-mail to Lies De Jaegher via festival@bspfestival.org.
MANIPULATION IN DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
The purpose of this workshop is to understand the role of manipulation in photojournalism and documentary photography. The central question is whether there is a place for manipulation and staging in photography genres that claim to depict an objective truth. What forms of documentary photography open the doors to different approaches of representing realities and understanding truths? Max Pinckers will lead a group discussion around the issue of manipulation in reference to various contemporary debates, case studies and examples from his own practice. This will be followed by a playful exercise in which participants will be invited to make photographs based on the discussions.
By attending this workshop, you will gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of manipulating visual media, and the responsibility that comes with representing reality through photography. You will learn to distinguish between manipulation that supports storytelling and manipulation that intentionally deceives viewers.
This workshop is part of Photo Atelier's offering. The organization was founded in 2023 with a basic idea: providing straightforward, high-quality, experience-based photography courses accessible to all, led and designed by esteemed practitioners professionals from the contemporary artistic field of photography.
Max Pinckers
Max Pinckers (b.1988, BE) grew up in Indonesia, India, Australia and Singapore, and is currently based in Brussels, Belgium. His work explores the critical, technological, and ideological structures that surround the production and consumption of documentary images. Documentary photography, for Pinckers, involves more than the representation of an external reality: it's a speculative process that approaches reality and truth as plural, malleable notions open to articulation in different ways.
Like the external world that it claims to represent, the documentary image is inherently unstable, dependent on context and on customary languages of realism. Pinckers’ work draws on contemporary and historical debates, merging fact, fiction and imagination to reflect on the ways that the real is defined and represented. It treats documentary as a hybrid practice involving not just images, but objects, performance, texts, found footage and sculptural interventions that investigate the complex nature of perception. Collaboration is essential to Pinckers’ practice, creating a space for the exchange of ideas between himself and the people he works with, and for critical examination of his own position as a photographer.
Ultimately, Pinckers’ self-reflexive work sets out to question both documentary discourse and artistic practice—to create new modes of documentary that foreground the deceptive nature of images yet always emotionally and empathically engages with people and their stories.
His work takes shape as self-published artist books and exhibition installations such as "The Fourth Wall" (2012), "Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty" (2014), and "Margins of Excess" (2018). Pinckers is a Doctor in the Arts and guest lecturer at the School of Arts KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent, Belgium. He has received multiple international awards, such as the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg 2015 and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2018. In 2015 he founded the independent publishing house Lyre Press and The School of Speculative Documentary in 2017. Pinckers is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp and Tristan Lund in London.
maxpinckers.be
Max Pinckers
Max Pinckers (b.1988, BE) grew up in Indonesia, India, Australia and Singapore, and is currently based in Brussels, Belgium. His work explores the critical, technological, and ideological structures that surround the production and consumption of documentary images. Documentary photography, for Pinckers, involves more than the representation of an external reality: it's a speculative process that approaches reality and truth as plural, malleable notions open to articulation in different ways.
Like the external world that it claims to represent, the documentary image is inherently unstable, dependent on context and on customary languages of realism. Pinckers’ work draws on contemporary and historical debates, merging fact, fiction and imagination to reflect on the ways that the real is defined and represented. It treats documentary as a hybrid practice involving not just images, but objects, performance, texts, found footage and sculptural interventions that investigate the complex nature of perception. Collaboration is essential to Pinckers’ practice, creating a space for the exchange of ideas between himself and the people he works with, and for critical examination of his own position as a photographer.
Ultimately, Pinckers’ self-reflexive work sets out to question both documentary discourse and artistic practice—to create new modes of documentary that foreground the deceptive nature of images yet always emotionally and empathically engages with people and their stories.
His work takes shape as self-published artist books and exhibition installations such as "The Fourth Wall" (2012), "Will They Sing Like Raindrops or Leave Me Thirsty" (2014), and "Margins of Excess" (2018). Pinckers is a Doctor in the Arts and guest lecturer at the School of Arts KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent, Belgium. He has received multiple international awards, such as the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg 2015 and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2018. In 2015 he founded the independent publishing house Lyre Press and The School of Speculative Documentary in 2017. Pinckers is represented by Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in Antwerp and Tristan Lund in London.
maxpinckers.be