My artistic practice revolves around exploring the materiality of the photograph. In a time when images are abundant, ephemeral, and overwhelmingly digital, I return to photography’s roots and propose a material reinterpretation of the medium that questions the distinction between image, print, and support. In PHOTO BRUTE, the photograph is not merely on an object; it is an object. I cast concrete tiles and plates and use them as the very surface that receives the photographic image. Through texture, materiality, chips and cracks, the support becomes a co-author of the image rather than a mere substrate. The result is a series of works that exist at the boundary between photography and sculpture.

Central to the very first experiments with photography in the early 1800s was the arduous task of getting images to adhere to unlikely surfaces like metal or stone. My project echoes the stubborn materiality of those early attempts. Concrete is water, sand, stone, and cement—decidedly un-glossy, but capable of holding surprising tonal nuance when treated with silver gelatin and developed like an analog print. Concrete speaks in light and shadow, in endlessly shifting shades of gray, in patterns and rhythms that are as much tactile as they are visual. Conceptually, PHOTO BRUTE investigates how medium and message contaminate each other, and to what extent they can become one. The subjects naturally match their carriers: from brutalist architecture, tunnels, and overpasses, all the way to microscopic images of individual cement particles reacting with water. This creates a self-referential loop: concrete depicts concrete; stone carries stone. It yields a photography that has mass, that throws a shadow, and that resonates when tapped—an image that cannot be scrolled or flattened and that needs to be met directly and in person.

The process is an integral part of this project, from mixing the concrete to applying the silver gelatin to developing in the darkroom. I document mixes, failed casts, and test tiles, thus supporting the project’s core claim: that photography—often thought of as immaterial data, all the more so in the age of AI—remains a practice of material, process, and time. PHOTO BRUTE offers a practical, almost artisanal way to think about reinventing photography: not by adding more images to the stream, but by slowing one image down until it has a body. The question I am pursuing is simple: how can light live in stone?

BIO

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (b. 1976) is a photographer and linguist based in Leuven and Amsterdam. Trained in linguistics and literature, he began his photographic journey in 2016, and obtained a degree as a photographic artist from the Institute for Arts and Crafts in Mechelen (Belgium) in 2024. His work bridges the conceptual and the tactile, exploring the intersections of materiality, structure, and the photographic image.

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