( Sehr Langsam ) - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Lieven Lefere (°1978, Roeselare) is an artist who plays with the complex relationship between the photographic image and reality. Lefere works extremely meticulously, in a particularly slow process. He carefully manipulates all the parameters that make a photo what it is. The process often starts months before the photo is taken. He starts from an extensive research, with a multitude of reference points. Sometimes he builds sets and scenes himself from that research or from his memories. He constructs his images with scale and framing, models the space, makes models, chooses the incidence of light. The sets disappear or become a spatial part of the work.

About the Author

Lieven Lefere (b. 1978, Roeselare, BE) is an artist who plays with the complex relationship between reality and the photographic image. Lefere creates a unique atmosphere in his images, which far transcend photography of the purely documentary kind, depicting reality in a similar way to how it appears in painting or architecture. The absence of human figures and his fascination with impermanence reinforce that atmosphere. In Lefere's work, time seems manipulated: delayed, frozen or even absent. Due to his approach, Lefere's images are always developed over an extended period of time. This protracted process yields highly layered images that are charged with meaning and require patience to decipher. They are the antithesis of what we usually associate with photography: more a constructed intention than a slice of life, more monument than snapshot. Cryptic, evocative and alienating all at once.