Bouncy castles, ring roads and panty liners. The italic snapshots of Freya Maes.
Italic (adj.) [I. italicus, from Gk. italikos Italian)], oblique letters used esp. for emphasis.
The PR people at a leading photographic company have done their best to make life easier for innocent visitors to Antwerp Zoo by installing a prominent ‘Photo Point'. This consists of a white notice identifying the perfect spot from which to take ‘lots of great pictures' - guaranteed picturesque snapshots framed by the zoo's lush greenery. So what does Freya Maes go and do? She takes a photograph of the notice itself. That sober image sets the tone for what remains one of the better manifestations of the ‘Documentaire foto-opdrachten Vlaanderen' (Flemish Documentary Photography) project.
The assignment given to Freya Maes was to document the shifting pattern of leisure in the Province of Antwerp. And that, broadly speaking, is what she did, although in retrospect, the theme as such seems somewhat secondary, providing a kind of cover under which the photographer could continue to work on her intriguing catalogue of the life and aspirations of l'homme moderne. A clearly disorientated example of the latter literally stumbled into her viewfinder around Christmas 1994 at a shopping mall in Wijnegem, while a similar ‘gift' rounds off her leisure book: four elderly people turn away from the churchyard in Westerlo to shuffle briskly towards a bright blue bouncy castle (‘Breughelfeesten', Westerlo, September 1994).
In her non-commission work, too, Freya Maes, prefers to focus on the events and places (or rather non-places) that have become more or less emblematic of Western consumer society and which generally ensure the presence of busloads of eager visitors: out-of-town shopping centres, car shows, ideal home exhibitions, mega-erotica fairs, theme parks, campsites and car parks. Quite a few photographers, depressed by all of this, have seized on it to present a tarnished image of a lifeless world, which people merely pass through, without ever truly encountering anyone else - a world dominated by fleeting spectacle and the ephemeral. A cold, featureless wasteland, absurd and bloodcurdlingly banal. Some attempt to portray it in a discreet and studiedly neutral way, while others recoil, turning in entirely upon themselves, their living rooms or their own bodies, in order to dispatch their querulous and intimate signals into the big, uncomprehending world.
Although this is plainly the same world that Freya Maes is looking at, she evidently sees it differently. She also wants to show it in a different way, to give out different signals. ‘Existential fear', ‘the great void' or an ‘uncompromising typology of our throw-away society' are hardly the main things on her mind as she goes about her work. Freya Maes is more like an updated Alice in Wonderland, making her way through the wildernesses of the West and realising with a kind of mature wonder that the things she encounters there are, indeed, often absurd, trivial or even downright ludicrous. So what, you might ask. She communicates all of this with neither an indifferent shrug nor with condescending superiority. The register in which she creates and places images is based on a clear-eyed sense of reality and a more or less gentle irony. Her work is tongue-in-cheek. ‘Just look at us,' she says, rather than ‘Get a load of these people!'
Freya Maes reports on these - generally - all too human activities in a visual idiom that appears, at first sight, to lean heavily towards the ‘aesthetic' of the snapshot. Which, on the face of it, is a contradiction in terms: a true snapshot has little or nothing to do with aesthetic conventions. The snapshot, considered in terms of its original ‘habitat' - that of the amateur or the family album - is not something one would immediately associate with the ‘rules of the art'. If anything, snapshots tend to provide an inventory of everything that can go wrong when taking a photograph (sloping horizons, extreme close-ups, dodgy framing, and so forth). And yet that is precisely what gives them their power: the quick, unaffected and natural snapshot, straight from life. You have to believe it. It comes as little surprise, therefore, that ‘real' photographers, too, sought from an early stage to master these spontaneous characteristics, developing the ‘snapshot style' into a fully-fledged genre - and one that has proved immensely popular. However, long before Nan Goldin or Wolfgang Tillmans were even born, the pioneering American photographer Lisette Model stated that above all else the essence of the snapshot resides in its ‘innocence'. No matter how casual or spontaneous their intentions might be, professional photographers can never feign that kind of innocence. They wait for that casual, unconventional moment. The moment itself might be unstructured, but the same can never be said of the photographer. Professionals don't take snapshots.
Apart from Freya Maes. For all that she is a thoroughbred photographer rather than an unblemished amateur, the pictures she takes are snapshots, albeit with an element of diversion. While her photographs tend to suggest that everything she shows was just there for the taking, they also convey the message that this does not mean that what we see in the image was captured in an equally ‘self-explanatory' way. What Freya Maes creates are fully matured and calculated snapshots. They are increasingly mature as far as selection and timing are concerned, and calculated in terms of effect, which means that her photographs never give the impression of being recherché in their trivialness. Nor, however, are they flukes. They are self-assured works that balance between ‘italic' and anecdote.
Where Freya Maes' spontaneous calculation can lead is apparent in several of the unpremeditated images she created in Russia. Among the photographs that fall entirely within the familiar register, we notice several that take up the same challenge, though now in a more sombre key: the desolate dining room with its prominent but handless clock, for instance, or the TV screen that suggests, with a touch of bewilderment, that ‘that fresh and dry, Always feeling' has now established itself in the former East Bloc, too. These restrained, italic images also seep, drop by drop into the preparatory shots for an assignment devoted to the A-12 motorway. Perhaps it takes someone like Freya Maes, who knows what it is to balance on the knife-edge between the trivial and the hilarious, to make do from time to time with a simple italicisation to achieve a meaningful effect.
Erik Eelbode