My photographic practice revolves around concrete, the materiality of the photograph, and an obsessive focus.

CONCRETE

I’m a late bloomer when it comes to photography: I only seriously started getting into it around 2016. What was immediately clear, though, was that I preferred photographing things over people. One type of subject I kept being drawn to were structures made of concrete; everything from the most exquisite brutalist masterpiece to an utterly utilitarian bridge or parking lot. There is so much to love about photographing concrete: the way it can capture light, the endless shades of gray it produces, the geometric patterns it occurs in, the rich and varied textures it displays, … the list goes on and on. A great source of inspiration in those early years—as well as today—was the work of Lucien Hervé. I still remember getting goosebumps the first time I laid eyes on his photographs, and his rigorous sense of composition is something I’ve aspired to ever since.

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC OBJECT

In the fourth year of my photography training at the Institute for Arts and Crafts in Mechelen, we were given an assignment that profoundly influenced the way I think about photography. We were asked to take one of our own images and to physically manipulate it. I started from an image I had taken of the Calypso building in Rotterdam. It’s a fascinating piece of architecture, the surface of which resembles a diamond: multifaceted, symmetrical, and distinctly three‐dimensional. In my original image, the building is flattened and reduced to its basic geometry, and so in the physical manipulations I wanted to reintroduce dimensionality, to give the building back some of its voluminosity, its materiality. Long story short, I went kind of crazy with this assignment and created a whole slew of manipulations: a maquette that recreated the various layers of the building, a foamboard version of the image in various layers, a stack of 100 photocopies of the image cut out at 1mm increments to create depth, a decomposition of the various shades of gray printed as different colors in a RISO-print, a version printed on cloth, etc. In working on this assignment, something clicked in my head: I’m interested in thinking about the photograph as a material object, not just as a transparant medium that tries to get out of the way. This inevitably also led to analogue printing techniques, in particular the use of silver gelatin, because of the wide variety of surfaces it can be applied to: with silver gelatin printing, any object can become a photograph.

OBSESSION

In photography as in life I find myself being drawn to and admiring people who have a sustained, obsessive, unapologetic focus on a single subject. I cannot phrase it more succinctly—or more beautifully—than Cesare Pavese did in 1947:

“Siamo convinti che una grande rivelazione può uscire soltanto dalla testarda insistenza su una stessa difficoltà. Non abbiamo nulla in commune coi viaggiatori, gli sperimentatori, gli avventurieri. Sappiamo che il piú sicuro—e piú rapido—modo di stupirci è di fissare imperterriti sempre lo stesso oggetto. Un bel momento quest’ oggetto ci sembrerà—miraculoso—di non averlo visto mai.”

A true revelation, it seems to me, will only emerge from stubborn concentration on a solitary problem. I am not in league with inventors or adventurers, nor with travelers to exotic destinations. The surest—also the quickest—way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before.

I first came across this quote in Robert Bringhurst’s The elements of typographic style—another great example of the type of obsessive focus I’m talking about—but in the field of photography, examples abound as well—photography tends to attract certain personality types it seems. The work that influenced me most in this respect were the typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. They look simple at first—take a couple of pictures of similar-looking buildings and present them in a grid—but then you learn about the obsessive focus they put into making these images: always with a 8x10-inch technical camera, always frontal shots, always from the same angle (which sometimes involved putting up their tripod in non-obvious places), always in overcast weather, always without people in the image, etc. Really understanding a subject such that you can present it in a simple and obvious way takes an enormous amount of effort.

PHOTO BRUTE

In the project PHOTO BRUTE these three ingredients came together. I knew I wanted to continue photographing concrete, but I also wanted to get more serious, more focused, more obsessive about it. So I started reading about concrete, both from a technical and from a cultural perspective, and I started making my own concrete. This led to me printing silver gelatin images on self-made concrete tiles, thus blurring the line between the subject matter and the photographic medium: the photographs became concrete objects themselves. And when I started combining images to make larger collages and composites, those new images began to take on properties of the brutalist architecture they were depicting: honest in their use of raw materials, transparently structured, and built in a modular fashion. The road towards these images was long and arduous—printing on home-made concrete is no walk in the park—but in their current state they represent a consistent body of work that I am proud of and want to use as the basis for my future creative work.

BIO

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (º1976) studied linguistics and literature in Brussels, Leuven, and Leiden. He’s currently working as a linguist in Leuven and Amsterdam. In 2017–2018 he took a three-part course on digital photography at the center for adult education in Mechelen, and in 2019 he started a five-year photography program at the Institute for Arts and Crafts in Mechelen. In June 2024 he graduated from that program with a project entitled PHOTO BRUTE.