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Max Pinckers
Margins of Excess
Max Pinckers
Max Pinckers. Performance #1 (Los Angeles), 2018
Belgian photographer Max Pinckers’ Margins of Excess presents a series of photographs in which the truth does not always correspond to reality.
The work tells the lives of six individuals who became famous and known to the American press for various disconcerting circumstances. The characters include Rachel Dolezal, who posed as an African American woman, and Herman Rosenblat, who invented a story about having survived the Holocaust.
What the protagonists share is an undeniable talent for the art of deception and a passion for the subversion of truth. In an era where truth is apparently a flexible commodity, the book aims to “pierce through the noise, buzz, pulp, lies, dreams, paranoia, cynicism and laziness and to embrace ‘reality’ in all its complexity”.
Selected Works
Max Pinckers
Performance #5 (New York)
1.5 ETH
Max Pinckers
Preaching to the Choir
2 ETH
Max Pinckers
The Arrest
1.5 ETH
Max Pinckers
The Conspiracy
2 ETH
Max Pinckers
X Marks The Spot
1.5 ETH
Max Pinckers
Hurry Up and Wait
1.5 ETH
Full Collection
Artist
Max Pinckers
1988 (Belgium)
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Max Pinckers is a photographer based in Brussels, Belgium. His work explores the critical, technological, and ideological structures that surround the production and consumption of documentary images.
For Pinckers, documentary photography 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.
Press + Articles
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Max Pinckers Interview: On Speculative Documentary
American Suburb X (article)
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Max Pinckers tracks the Margins of Excess between truth and fiction
British Journal of Photography (article)