BARBARA VANDENDRIESSCHE | CAPTURING THE EMOTIONAL BODY EXPLORING VISUAL POETRY

BARBARA VANDENDRIESSCHE
CAPTURING THE EMOTIONAL BODY EXPLORING VISUAL POETRY

Finalist at the International Open Call Competition. A collaboration of Florence Biennale, Art Market Magazine, and Lens Magazine.

“My photos are often staged and focus on physicality, emotion, or expression. They look for physical and psychological vulnerability.
I create the whole image as a photographer, stylist, and set designer. My photography is theatrical. But ‘theatricality’ is an elastic concept and also has many negative connotations: bombastic, exaggerated, false, or artificial.”
– Barbara Vandendriessche

BARBARA VANDENDRIESSCHE

I worked for 20 years as a director and set designer at the theater. But more and more, photography, which I initially regarded as a sideline, invaded my professional path. I discovered how my experience within the theater influenced the language of my photography and experienced a sense of “back to basics”, of re-sourcing. In order to be able to clarify this more, I decided to leave the black box in 2017 and tell my story, starting from photography and sculpture. (I still work as a drama teacher at Luca drama, Luca School of arts, and as a freelance stage designer, f.i. for Milo Rau, NTGent).
My photos are staged and focus on physicality, emotion, and expression. They look for physical and psychological vulnerability. I create the whole image as a photographer, stylist, and set designer. My sculptures are a study of damage, both in the use of matter and in the expression of an emotion. The broken, the damaged, the unfinished, and the confused are represented differently through heads and bodies.
Yet there is always a “sparkle,” sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, perceptible.
My photos are staged, are theatrical. But ‘theatricality’ is an elastic concept. This is how I define it myself: it is the abstracting and enlargement of reality to evoke emotion in the viewer, not through reason, but directly appealing to an approach that can be traced to our human instincts.
That is what I try to represent with photography: to portray the emotional body tragically, to create
a tragic image that expresses emotion and triggers emotion. I search for images with intensity, not images with intentions. Images you look at because they tell you something, even if you do not immediately know what. Images that evoke a story without being narrative. Often with the female body as an expression of beauty.

Read the full article in Lens Magazine Issue #81